Cy Twombly in Boston!!!!!!

January 14–May 7, 2023 - Making Past Present: Cy Twombly at the MFA

It’s been a few years already since my passion for Twombly’s work has gone to a low simmer. But for a few years after I first found out about him via an obit by Pierre Joris when Cy died in 2011 I was quite obsessed with his life and work. I eventually made a pilgrimage to the Twombly Gallery at the Menial Collection in Houston and spent most of two wonderful days just soaking him up. I slowly gathered information about his life and his works which I collected into a rather expensive website PANORAMA. Sadly Google is no longer supporting the “old” version of Sites and most of the links to my enormous collection of images are now broken. But I still have them and could give anyone with an interest a link to my Twombly folder.

Over the years I learned everything I could about his life and travels, so when Joshua Rifkin published Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly there was very little in it that I didn’t already know. I’m still rather pleased with myself that over this entire time I very rarely read any “art criticism” of his work. I devoured Sally Mann’s writing, and collected all I could about his personality and life, but I studiously avoided reading critical accounts - and there are MANY. One exception: Kirk Varnedoe. I’ll read anything he wrote about anyone. He was generous, brilliant and illuminating. And I will always read anything that another practicing artist has to say, but I avoided critics like the plague. Not because they can’t be useful, which they can - but because I just wanted the experience of his work - not the ideation ABOUT it. And for me that is hard to come by, since I have always had an overactive intellect. But there is something so amazingly powerful and mysterious and moving about his art that it just screams for us to pay attention. And it also calls for interpretation. Right there on the canvas, or the paper, or in the strange whiteness of his sculptural surfaces - RIGHT THERE it cries “think about me.” But I made it my task to try to do that thinking in my body. I’m not sure what success I’ve had, but I’ve had some at least. As an example: in the Menil Gallery there is a room with “the Lexington paintings” - several of them. It seemed to me, and still does, that in those works, in that period of his life, is the “key” to all his work. Sometimes I wonder whether the key to all pictorial art is somehow in those enigmatic, silent, wondrous histories of his painterly acts.

But with Twombly, as Varnedoe says, none of his works can be apprciated in reproduction. You have to be there in the flesh with them. And that is very literally true: you really do have to see them yourself to have any sense of what he was doing. So finally we in the east have a chance to be with his stuff!!!! I am so excited!!!! We’ll be going to Boston sometime probably in late March, when we can begin to hope for decent traveling weather. This is a MAJOR exhibition of the sort that is a once in a lifetime chance to see his stuff together. In one of the very first reviews of one of his very first shows, Frank O’Hara (yes, that Frank O’Hara) said that Twombly’s work is best seen when he is exhibited by himself - just his own works. In my experience with a few galleries around the country that has proved true. It is a magnificent experience to be with him - just him. At the MFA he’s shown along with some of the ancient, mythic art that inspired him, and I expect that will be the exception to the rule. I can’t wait!

MAKING PAST PRESENT: CY TWOMBLY

I’VE BEEN WAITING HALF MY LIFE FOR THIS SHOW - SEBASTIAN SMEE IN THE WASHINGTON POST