The Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

The Building.

The museum web site has very good photographs of the building and a good text describing its components and so I do not have to repeat that here. But I do want to comment on the fact that it presents its side rather than its front to the street. A sidewalk leads from the street parallel to the entry door wall and so close to it that it is not possible to get a full view of the building design before entering into it. Architecturally I consider this a bad idea: wherever the entry door might be, and Frank Lloyd Wright was very good at hiding them, one should have a sense of the building’s form while he is on the inside.Renzo Piano did much the same thing in the Morgan Library renovation and I dislike it for the same reason.

Why this was done I do not know. However, in one of the photographs you can see that the walk to the door includes a slight rise in the terrain and so it is possible that if the building was sited on a hill, by entering at the side the architect could use the sidewalk rise to avoid adding a stairway or pedestal base at the entry. I am not at all sure, however, that this is the reason: Houston is a very flat city.

You can see as well from the photographs that the building appears to be square in plan. It is but with the addition of an entry lobby that is a thin rectangle across the entry side which extends the square on that side. Inside the gallery plan is square and it is divided into nine parts, three, three, and, on the north side, two …one gallery is two units.

Both times that I visited this building I turned to the left upon entry and moved clockwise from front to back to front, seeing the middle gallery last. It was not until leaving the second time that I realized that the long bare wall in the double unit gallery had been finished with white Venetian plaster. I asked the docent (attendant?) why just that one wall had been done and she informed me that all of the interior walls had that same treatment. Mr. Twombly had demanded that finish and had recommended the workman who came from Italy to do the job.

Venetian plaster is an old world technique. It is, nowadays, spackle made of marble dust, easily tinted to the desired color, and in the mid to late 1990’s it was all the rage in American interior decoration, especially among the moneyed set. (It is expensive.) Done in one color, or white, it is almost impossible to see in diffuse lighting …you can only really see it if you stand next to the wall and let your eyes rake the surface. Sometimes it is finished by being buffed with the stainless steel floats used in the application and in other instances it can be further buffed and waxed. When it is waxed and polished it looks like Formica. Because it is so hard to see, as it is here, I have always wondered why they bothered …apparently, here, to placate Mr. Twombly. (The interior of the new Herzog de Meuron wing of the Walker Art Center has the same finish and from the ripples in the wall you can discern that it has been applied over sheet rock laid horizontally.)

Mr. Twombly also required that the flooring be six inch yellow pine plank neither too red nor too yellow, neutral, so that it bounced a neutral light from the floor up onto the artwork. The docent assured me that each plank had been individually selected: also I assume by Mr. Twombly.

What are noticeable here are the large pieces of cotton fabric stretched tautly across the ceilings below the sunlight filtering roofing system. These huge pieces are hemmed on the sides and have grommets about every six inches. There are clips attached to turnbuckles that in turn attach to the walls. Originally it was estimated that they would probably hang for about ten years before the mid sections began to sag. Fortunately, in the eighteen years since they were installed, they have not needed to be replaced at all. In a display of masterful design and execution there are perfectly placed openings for the lighting fixture’s stems that pass through to the ceiling light grid. They supplement the illumination of the paintings. This fabric had been a requirement by Mr. Twombly as well.

Near the end of my conversation with the docent I was reminded of the 1895 exhibition in Paris, the first career retrospective of Cezanne’s work. After sending his work to Paris from his home in Aix, Cezanne made his way to the gallery with his son. Later, on their way home, Cezanne said to him, proudly: “Did you notice: every one of those paintings was framed!” Apparently he had made no suggestions regarding the decoration of the rooms in which the paintings had been shown or of the manner in which they were displayed. And for himself, an unframed Cezanne was fine …as I suspect it would be for any one lucky enough to own one.

At the end of his summer in Antibes where he had been provided a studio for his painting by the community, Picasso said to the mayor, “I’m giving you the work I did here this summer: make a museum.” I have yet to read that he had any requirements for its interior decoration.

I think it is possible that when a man is confident of his own genius he probably doesn’t need to concern himself with gilding the lily of his production with fussy decorator innovations: he knows full well that the work will stand, not stand or fall …stand… on its own and in whatever environment it happens to be placed.

When an artist does concern himself with the choice of draperies and hand towels in the exhibition hall  I think it’s possible that he suspects that his work is borderline decoration and furthermore it is likely that he believes that only old world elegance will give it that added something to boost it toward the awesome.

I find that much of the artwork of the New York School is merely decoration, which Corbusier defines as the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. A lot of it looks like stuff you can find in any upscale furniture store. I have never considered Twombly’s work in that light, but as I was for the most part greatly disappointed by what I saw here, learning about his obsessive involvement in this project caused me to reconsider his achievement.

The  Work.

I believe it is correct to say that Cy Twombly is considered a member of the New York School even though he spent most of his working years in Rome. He was a recognized, commercially successful modern artist from the 1950’s until his recent death. Even though I lived and worked in New York during those years I was completely unaware of him or his work. He only came to my attention a few years ago when the Whitney did a retrospective of his work…more or less 2002.  At that same time I bought the catalogue to his 1977 Whitney retrospective at a flea market for a dollar.

That catalogue featured work from the years 1954 to 1977 and in looking through the book I was saddened to see that for that whole period it all looked much the same. I always respond with sadness when I see that an artist has boxed himself into a corner with the creation of an imagery that cannot be repeated by other artists without there being made claims of plagiarism and that he never allows himself to work outside that concept. (Rothko, Barnet Newman, Stuart Davis, Frank Stella, et al.) I am more inclined to like the work of Picasso who could work in six or more styles in one day, or by Warhol who appeared to flit from one thing to another: they give strong evidence of a lively and healthy mental life and seem to celebrate the great variety of the human experience.

From some source, (the Whitney catalogue?) I remember reading that in his early days Cy Twombly would arrange a paper so that he could not see it and make unpremeditated marks on it and then study the results. I suppose this was somewhat in the nature of the automatic writing/drawing that the surrealists had done. I can understand why the de Menil’s would have liked his work.

I think of those works as scribble drawings, the kind of thing my ex mother in law would look at and exclaim: “I can do That!” The truth is that even if she could, she didn’t. But there is also a feeling when looking at those works, and there are two galleries of them here at the Menil, that Twombly knew how much to put in and when to stop …my ex mother in law, by contrast, did not.

It is also true that while one or two of these might be interesting, they are all so much alike that two galleries of them are more than one needs to get the idea. From them I understand that there is a something that wants to be said. That is perfectly legitimate: I for one am ready to move on. Like my mother in law Mr. Twombly didn’t.

They also open themselves to ridicule: the friend who saw this work with me suggested that the paintings looked like pieces of sheet rock in a house under renovation. (In years past he did house renovation. As did I.) I could only agree. They do.

As writings/drawings I am more inclined to prefer the later work which bears a striking resemblance to sweeping arcs on a blackboard. I love the freedom of those and the looseness of the shoulder movement. (I love drawing.) But, again, I have a limited patience for too many of these. And as for Twombly’s work being decoration, I can think of several places in a number of homes where paintings like these would, as they say, look nice.

As for their being considered fine art, I think not. It should be impossible I would think to convince an audience that that which appears on a construction material as an act of public defacement is, on a well prepared length of linen an example of fine art. And while the concept is memorable in the aggregate, none of them individually achieves an iconic presence that would sufficiently intrigue a person to want to know more about them or the artist. When we, I, think of Cy Twombly’s work, there is no Marilyn or Jackie screen print, no Marie Therese sleeping, no Rape of Europa, no Burghers of Calais, nor fifty three Rembrandt self portraits …I can also recall specific Grecian urns, African masks, pre-Columbian figurines, and Han and Tang Dynasty tomb figures, etc.

In the three galleries across the back of the building there are paintings where Twombly worked with color, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What is so noteworthy about all of them is that he seemed not to know how to use color. The work is either very tentative or over wrought. In the last of these three galleries there are a series of paintings in green and black, lots of green and black, too much in fact. They are poorly done and rather third rate in their sensibility. To me they read as Fragonard in the New World. In fact I thought that they were embarrassing …likely the poorest work in the entire Menil Collection.

I have seen him do better with color elsewhere …at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There, in a gallery to themselves, are a series of paintings: Fifty Day of Illiam, of which five or six are shown. They are magnificent. They are commanding but not too big. They evoke an incredibly strong visceral response. Even though mythic, this is a human engagement that altered the course of western history. I believe it and feel it as never before.

By contrast, here in the double square gallery hangs a large painting that I believe is a companion to those paintings. It is literally the length of a tennis court. And as if to extend that conceit, plain wooden bleachers have been provided for the spectators. But when sitting there and turning your head from this end to that and back again you become aware that the painting is too big. It is so big, in fact, that in the turning this way and that you lose interest in it. It evokes nothing like a visceral experience at all. Sans a tennis ball it is a non event. In an era of large scale paintings for which the New York school was so famous, this is simply the granddaddy of big paintings.

Hopefully no one will challenge its supremacy. I have had quite enough of oversized paintings. Few of them can do what Mondrian accomplished in a twenty four inch square. Kurt Schwitters could take the detritus at the bottom of an old desk drawer, glue it to a sheet of typing paper and create a world without end. The lesson here as in so many other places is simply this: less is more less is more less is more.

When I began writing this blog about my museum going a few years ago, I determined that I would not write about something if I had a negative response to it; I wanted my comments to be positive and to encourage those who read them to get out and see things that I thought were worthwhile. In rereading these notes I feel that I am being more negative than I should be. Allow me to amend this attitude: I like this work but it has its limitation. And in my comments in Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures I stated that Cy Twombly was one of the few New York School artists whose work could be seen in large groups without being tiresome. I hereby amend that to read …groups … not large groups.

And I think if I were to erect a gallery to but one New York School artist it would be either a Jackson Pollack or an Andy Warhol gallery. In a properly arranged Pollack Gallery the museumgoer would see the history of his development as an artist and share in his intellectual growth, comprehension and development. One would also see that in his restless pursuit of what might be attainable, he never stopped or came to rest at any one place…he, like Picasso, was always moving on.

Andy Warhol’s work is an ongoing dialogue with western painting and much of it sets out to debunk the conventional wisdom of high art. There is one series of his work that is relevant here. In a group of very large paintings on beautifully prepared linen grounds he poured paint in three or four areas and achieved a result somewhat similar to these Iliad paintings. As you get nearer to study them up close, you can then lean over and read the wall label and you discovery that these are the famous Piss paintings: Andy poured out the paint here and there and then asked whoever was in the studio to urinate into the wet puddles creating spontaneous design by accident areas of color. When you discover that you have your face in a puddle of dry piddle the paintings evoke a response even more visceral than Twombly’s. Was that the intention? Which came first?

While I might have been more negative here than I had intended, I believe I am not as cynical as Andy Warhol could be. But what I admire about him is his honesty: when there was a something that wanted to be said, he didn’t diddle around: he just said it.

Because the front of the building is so on top of you as you enter, you might not see at the front four posts and a lintel which create the entrance. As you exit the galleries, you do notice two posts and a lintel forming a portal back to the lobby. I suspect that these have been made of precast reinforced cement. This unit is perfect in its proportions and evokes the strongest sense of an archaic passageway into an arena where secret rites might once have been performed. It also evokes the design philosophy of Louis Kahn, one of the great masters of twentieth century architecture. If the museum had been sited so that these entry portals were more clearly evident this would have been a deeper and richer experience. Discovered as you exit, this one simple building element is suddenly the most rewarding aspect of this installation. I urge you to see it: it’s that good.

http://www.menil.org/collection/CyTwomblyInDepth.php