“The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” at the Menil Drawing Institute Thru August 9
+1 “The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” at the Menil Drawing Institute Thru August 9
“The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” at the Menil Drawing Institute Thru August 9
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Collage
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Collage of postcards, tickets, and tape, with wax crayon, graphite, and ink on paper, 29 1/2 × 27 5/8 in. (75 × 70.1 cm). The Menil Collection, Houston, Gift of the Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation
Source: Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Collage“The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” at the Menil Drawing Institute Thru August 9
“The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” at the Menil Drawing Institute Thru August 9
“The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” at the Menil Drawing Institute Thru August 9
Years ago in New York I had the good luck to attend some lectures by the art historian Robert Rosenblum. What Professor Rosenblum lacked in personality – trust me, it wasn’t bubbly – he overcame with brilliance.
Rosenblum used an unrelentingly poetic style when writing about art. To show you what I mean, he once told readers the floating horizontal tiers of veiled light in a Rothko painting, “seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths.”
I’ve often thought the prof was at his most poetically rarefied when discussing Cy Twombly’s work, which drew heavily on the Mediterranean region after the artist moved to Rome in 1957, and contains jittery, barely decipherable scribbles that reference Mediterranean and North African locations as well as Greek and Roman mythology. When Twombly fabricated his signature into a classical-style motif in his painting “Sahara (1960),” Rosenblum noted it was “like a private variant of an ancient Roman inscription, beginning with the artist’s personal scrawl for name and place, but then dated with Roman numerals MCMXXXXXX, as if Twombly were reincarnating some ancient historian and traveler, a modern Herodotus who explores the North African desert, which here surfaces and again vanishes in the uncertain recall of a voyager’s memory.” To top it off, the desert scene “quivers immaterially before our eyes” and captures “the horizontal infinities of the desert.”
Glimpses through Rosenblum’s eyes might hint at the rampant complexity of Twombly’s work, and help you “get” why Edouard Kopp, Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute (what a sweetie), called Twombly “one of the most innovative and consequential draftspeople of the 20th century.”
The Menil Drawing Institute received a gift of 121 Twombly drawings from the Cy Twombly Foundation. Happy news. So it opened the exhibition “The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” to celebrate. Here’s what the Menil Drawing Institute wants you to know:
The Menil Collection is pleased to announce “The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly,” on view at the Menil Drawing Institute through August 9, 2026. The presentation features a selection of some thirty works gifted to the museum by the Cy Twombly Foundation that underscores the Menil’s importance as an international destination for the study, presentation, and appreciation of Twombly’s work. Those highlighted in the exhibition cover three decades of the artist’s activity, from the 1950s to the 1980s, and feature a broad range of materials, from graphite to oil paint; techniques such as drawing and collage; and themes that are fundamental to his entire practice, such as classical antiquity, eroticism, and nature.
The Foundation’s landmark gift to the Menil in 2025 of 121 of Twombly’s drawings vastly expands the museum’s holdings and transforms its ability to exhibit and study this aspect of the artist’s practice. It celebrates the museum’s nearly two decades of investment through the Menil Drawing Institute in elevating the visibility of drawing, its centrality in artists’ lives, and its crucial role in modern and contemporary artistic culture.
Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator, Menil Drawing Institute, said, “The exhibition celebrates the Cy Twombly Foundation’s generous donation, which now allows the Menil to represent the full range of Twombly’s considerable talents in the field of drawing. His experimental mark-making makes him one of the most innovative and consequential draftspeople of the 20th century.”
The works in this show, none of which have ever been exhibited in the United States, include a series of lush and unrestrained landscapes from 1986 that verge on pure abstraction, two untitled works from 1970 that are related to the artist’s “blackboard paintings” on view at the Menil’s Cy Twombly Gallery, and Narcissus, 1975, a collage of paper, with oil, charcoal, and wax crayon on paper inscribed with the title of the work in large capital letters across the bottom.
“The Gift of Drawing: Cy Twombly” is curated by Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator, Menil Drawing Institute.
