Just got back from the object of my pilgrimage: The Cy Twombly collection at the Menil in Houston. As I entered the Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair room, I found myself weeping – not knowing why, not caring why, but weeping. As if that moment – all alone in the beautiful building dedicated to his work, no one else anywhere, the sound of complete silence – were the reason, the real reason, the full reason, UD hauled herself onto a plane from DC and came down here. And – listen up!

After a long stretch of years, I found myself drawn to re-visit the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston this past spring. It felt like a homecoming. I stood in the room containing the polyptych in five parts, “Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair” (1985), for hours, observing the subtle shifts of light and shadow with tears streaming down my cheeks. Twombly’s inimitable handwriting was so familiar, although the colors—burgeoning wine-drunk purples and devastating orange-reds—had been so hard to hold in the mind and the realization that they would slip away from me again was heartbreaking. This has been the one group of works about which I’ve been unable to write. These tender pink blushes and bruised blooms always struck me as too achingly beautiful, almost embarrassingly so, to put into words. They contain all that they need in phrases drawn from Leopardi, Rilke, and Rumi (“In drawing and drawing you, his pains are delectable. His flames are like water.”). More text, it would seem, could only serve [to] diminish them.

That’s a whole other human being, tears streaming in front of the exact same work that brought on my waterworks! Listen to what else Claire Daigle has to say about UD’s way-favorite artist.

It has become something of a cliché to call Twombly a painters’ painter, but with his charmed bookishness, he is foremost, in my mind, a writers’ painter. His gestures move between those of writing and drawing, between drawing and painting. Signs perch on the verge of manifest expression, often evading, occasionally gratifying legibility. His [art] partakes of Hermes’s signs, gathering in force as they range from mark to word to quotation through redaction and negation to clamor and quietude. The chromatic incidents—from tiny gem gleams to full blown detonations—and the extraordinary range of types of mark are felt only by the body, Dionysian. They remind us of all in art that escapes the verbal clutch that would hope to seize that which exists only in moments when the attentive gaze is fully present.

It was Roland Barthes’ essay on Twombly that got me going on the man, and I’ve never stopped loving him