Cy Twombly, Menil Collection, Houston

I sit alone in the Cy Twombly gallery in Houston, surrounded by silence and beauty. I can’t remember the last time I had the privilege and luxury of being alone with such magnificent paintings, just me and the paintings. I sit opposite Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) 1994 . The colors are brilliant–blue, yellow, red, yellow —complicated, rendered uncertain by the black scrawls that erase them, rethink them. I am struck by the echoes of Rauschenberg in this painting, the Rauschenberg I saw two days ago, Gilder. I often get close to Twombly via Rauschenberg, but today I realize it makes no sense to compare them. Still, I see the lines, the loose brushstrokes of the artist at work, in the process of thinking, just as I had on Rauschenberg's canvas a couple of days ago. The strokes, the dissolution and disappointment of color as it bleeds, drips, runs off the edge of the canvas are so like Rauschenberg’s Gilder. But the laying bare of the artist at work on this canvas is for me, today, where the resonance with Rauschenberg ends.

Over dinner last night, Sharon and I talked about the movement, the drift of Twombly’s sculptures. She noted their sense of journey, reminding her of boats, and vessels. Our conversation prompted me to think of the paintings through a new lens. The sculptures are usually made of found pieces of wood. I remembered their fragility, the vulnerability of their material, their structure. This massive Untitled painting echoes that sense of floating, of movement off a canvas, where everything is ephemeral, on its way to inconsequence, the quest finding solace in its failure. It’s this sense of disappearance and disappointment that, today, overwhelmed me about Cy Twombly’s paintings.


A triptych that moves from right to left. How unusual. I remember Problem I, II, III in the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst, a triptych that moves from left to right, as we would read words in a book. But, this untitled triptych in Houston is different, entirely different: it is so enormous that I must physically walk its length, from right to left. The two side panels could not be more opposite. The right is replete with intense color, where paint melts, its tears streaking and staining the white face of the canvas. With the exception of the top right hand corner, the canvas is full — with emotive eruptions of anger, sadness, grief, love, with writing, and Twombly’s familiar scrawls. Poetry, “How you gaze beyond …” and I cannot decipher the rest. “… and yet there on the other shore under the dark gaze sun in your eyes you were there the other side the other dawn the other birth and yet there you were in the vast time by drop.” Again, it is the sea that inspires and holds the tension of this right panel. On the other side of the center panel, far at the other end of the gallery wall, on the other shore, the sun no longer shines in the eyes of the lost and lonely, calm and forgotten. Only a few wax scrawls remain, and an intense explosive flesh, white and pink painted gesture over which the light of the graphite inscription floats: “Shining white air trembling in white light reflected in the white flat sea”. All the color has dissolved, the intense emotion has dissipated, the color left, paint finally has fallen off the bottom of the canvas, where dissolution becomes a gesture of the resolution to the journey. This movement and disappearance speaks a narrative that doesn’t necessarily peter out, but one that no longer needs to be told. It reminds me of the tide as it comes up on the beachfront, and then leaves its trace when it goes back out to sea, with more important things to do and to say. And so, I, the viewer, in the end, am left with a sense of peace and serenity, as if I lie restfully in the white boat that takes me to the white light on the white sea. I drift.



On the journey to this blissful state of whiteness, as I walk the length of the painting, I am challenged by the familiar Twombly coagulations of thick paint, some bounded by black crayon, others resiliently, yet precariously, stuck to the canvas. There are scribbles and scrawls in crayon and graphite, reworked in grey paint, sometimes erased by the same flesh color that reaches stillness on the left hand side. And so, I have been on a journey: I have been carried along, I drifted with the boat, following the cry from one shore to the other, the demand of a painting, triptych in form, that drags me along its length. I have become the driftwood that Twombly finds lost at sea.

Robert Rauschenberg, Gilder, 1962 at the Menil

As a confirmed lover of everything grey, the Menil Collection down the street from the Rothko Chapel was like a dream come true. Even before we stepped inside the museum itself, everything around us was grey: the wooden bungalows in the tree lined street, and even the squirrels crowding around the door of the Twombly Gallery waiting for peanuts were grey grey grey. Renzo Piano’s building is grey, the carpet in the upstairs offices is grey and there is a surfeit of grey paintings on the walls.



Of the many discoveries of the day in grey was an unknown (for me) Robert Rauschenberg painting: Gilder, from 1962. Gilder is painted in an interstitial period in Rauschenberg’s career: historically it sits between the works in a single color – black, white, and later, red – and the better known combines of the sixties and seventies. And, like most things in grey, this interstitial status is translated into stasis, disinterest, and on the way to something else, not of great significance in and of itself. Works such as Gilder have not attracted the attention of better known ones. perhaps for this reason. Of course, they haven’t, they are executed in grey.

Gilder sits on a wall, appropriately, opposite Rauschenberg's flamboyant and loud Holiday Ruse (Night Shade), 1991, an enormous "acrylic and tarnishes on Aluminium", and one of Warhol’s grey screenprints, Little Race Riot, from 1962. Gilder’s place on the walls of the Menil reflects other aspects of its identity. Somewhere between painting and screenprint, Rauschenberg both paints and prints, as well as transfers photographs to canvas, and breaks the surface with his characteristic use of stencils and charcoal. The painting both looks back to the single color canvases because it is executed in a spectrum of greys, and it looks forward to the combines with its sense of collage, the introduction of the ordinary, newspapers, photographs, and other everyday objects onto the canvas – if only in two dimensional representation.

As such, occuppying this interstice between painting and combine, the work references Rauschenberg’s increasing interest in media of reproduction, mass cultural objects, the identity of the nation (the common reference to the USA is here executed through a stencil on a postage stamp). At the same time, it is tentative, a tentativity we see best in the loose strokes of the brush, scattered around the canvas. There is a slather of light grey paint that covers the bottom half of the right hand side of the canvas, and numerous instances of four or five connected strokes of paint, as though he is testing out the color and how it looks, making a swatch of the paint. It is as though something is being worked out on this canvas, something is not yet finished, the artist still unsure of where he is going. I wonder if this is indeed a characteristic of Rauschenberg’s paintings in general? Before the combines that is? Certainly, this tentativity is in stark contrast to the certitude, the force and power of Jasper Johns’ Voice in the next room. Rauschenberg drifts onto and away from this canvas, he is sometimes present, at others, the painting dissolves, as though he has forgotten it. It is as though he has moved on to other things, another phase in his career.

Rothko Chapel, Houston

As the daylight streams in through the circular opening in the roof of the Rothko Chapel in suburban Houston, the glory of these works is developed when they build a relationship with the elements that touch them: a cloud passes over the Chapel, the room darkens as do the works, and they begin to absorb the fading light that touches them. At other times, when the diffuse light enlivens the space, the paintings react instantaneously: they reflect this light, as if rejoicing in its appearance through the clouds, the paintings’ surface becomes shiny. This process of oscillation between flatness and depth, between differing relations of surface and ground, in direct correspondence to the movement of the sun, the clouds, and presumably at night, the moon and the stars, inspires the magic and awe of Rothko’s paintings.

There is also the relationship that we, the spectators, develop with the paintings. We motion and behave towards them as though they are icons, in my case, journeying from across the Atlantic ocean, suffering flight delays, lost luggage, a missed meeting with my travel companion, to be before paintings that have the power to make the ardor of travel irrelevant. And yet, these 14 paintings, some in triptych formation, others peacefully alone on a wall, are not icons. These are paintings that can never be removed or distanced from our response to them. To sit on one of the cushions placed on the floor and meditate, would seem to me to ignore the mystery and revelation of the self which here comes from falling into the paintings. It wouldn’t seem appropriate. For the mystery and reverie, the discovery of self that is had before these masterworks is borne of our ongoing relationship to the paintings, in time, as we sit before them, contemplating their enormity, their magnitude. To take away the painting, to meditate and turn inwards, would be to shut down and shut off from the source of inspiration. Despite the books that line the entrance to the chapel — the Torah, the Koran, the Bible, works on Zen Buddhism, even the Course in Miracles — the chapel is not a place where we find God, or a spirit outside of ourselves. This is a world that we enter into and discover a spiritual place inside of ourselves, a place that exists only in its reflection of the canvas. It’s a spiritual experience that has painting and these paintings in particular at its center. And so, for me, the chapel is a shrine to painting, to the power of painting, its ability to show us a place in ourselves that we did not yet know existed.

How then do the paintings ensure that we do not drift away, so far into ourselves that we forget them? They pull us towards them, to a place where we see the weft and warp of the canvas, even as it has been worked over, again and again and again. The paint on a canvas is just glorious, breathtaking, mesmerizing, incredible. There is no superlative too great for the power, energy and excitement of these paintings. Though perhaps resisting hierarchies, my favorites, those I found most captivating, where paint becomes dynamic, as if exploding on a canvas, are those of the triptych at the North face of the chapel. The movement and velocity of paint on the canvas is more chaotic, more agitated than I have seen in any other Rothko painting. In violet, the energy is like that of an orchestra on its way to reaching the climax of a concerto. And yet, it carries none of the weight of an orchestra in full force: the paintings are so luminous, almost transparent, as if in the middle of a Brahms Kinderzenen. We know because we are familiar with Rothko’s process that he has worked this paint over and over again. The violet of the central panel is also surprising, it’s so unique in Rothko’s oeuvre, like nothing else I have seen on this scale. When we sit long enough with it, the center panel reflects a pool of maroon on the panel to its left – how did that happen? The violet paintings are unique because although different colors reveal themselves over time, the canvas is not composed of blocks of two or more different colors.

As I look around the room, I wonder how an artist can create so much movement, depth, life, emotion, in a single color field. On the south wall, a black on maroon painting has a black stripe across the top of the black section. Though I saw this painting recently in London, I hadn't noticed the stripe. And in another light, a different time of day, I might not notice it in Houston. A distinct black line running vertically, part way down the edge of another painting shows uncertainty, vulnerability, a rethinking, the covering over of an old thought, the addition of a new one. Their revelations are infinite, but my discovery of them has only just begun.