Drawing Out Twombly

Cy Twombly was all over New York and Dean Rader was there to see it.

By Dean RaderJune 4, 2025

• Art & Architecture

I BEGIN WITH some questions. What is the difference between writing and drawing? What distinguishes seeing from reading? Can a painting be illegible? Can you write a drawing? In what ways can writing resist erasure and yet also be a mode of erasure? These are the dilemmas that haunt me when I think of the work of Cy Twombly, one of the United States’ most enigmatic artists.

Twombly (1928–2011) has been a polarizing figure. He is best known for his large scrawly works in grayscale, sometimes called “blackboard paintings,” that resemble the marks of a second grader trying to learn cursive and failing. The artist has drawn (ha!) admiration from some of the greatest writers and critics of our era, from Roland Barthes and Robert Motherwell to Octavio Paz and Anne Carson. Yet few artists have also been on the end of more ridicule. Donald Judd called an early exhibit of Twombly’s “a fiasco.” Jackson Arn described a Twombly series from 2003 as “too repetitively cheery to be engaging, like a bad series of children’s books.” In 1994, when the Museum of Modern Art hosted a Twombly retrospective, Artforum ran competing takes on Twombly’s oeuvre titled “Cy’s Up” and “Size Down,” in which the venerable scholar Rosalind E. Krauss and Peter Schjeldahl (who would go on to be the art critic at The New Yorker) squared off. Wading into the debate, curator Kirk Varnedoe penned “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.” And exactly a decade ago, in a glowing piece in Artforum, the novelist and critic Travis Jeppesen dubbed Twombly “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century, and the greatest painter after Picasso, period.”

That is an astonishing statement. And I’m not sure he’s wrong.

Twombly’s career, like his art, defies easy classification. He attended Black Mountain College, where he studied with Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and the poet Charles Olson. Robert Rauschenberg was a classmate. And while Twombly is sometimes lumped in with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, somehow that association doesn’t feel quite right. In fact, Twombly is often linked to a variety of schools and movements, ranging from surrealism to street art. Twombly’s mutability reminds me of a famous quote by the late poet and art critic David Antin: “From the modernism that you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve.” Altered for current purposes, this quip might read, “From the art that you want, you get the Twombly you deserve.” You want minimalism? We have your minimalist Twombly. You want something literary? Lines of poetry are everywhere in Twombly. You want graffiti? Large illegible handwriting is Twombly’s trademark. You want cubism? Boxes, squares, and collages abound in his work. You want something spontaneous and surreal? Throw a fuzzy cup and saucer at the wall, and you’ll hit a frenetic, spontaneous Twombly.

If Twombly was divisive in the 1990s, he has in the intervening years emerged as an unlikely figure of cohesion. In fact, earlier this year, I visited three fabulous—and fabulously different—shows in New York that were all Twombly-centric: The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, curated by Hilton Als, at the Hill Art Foundation; A Rose Is at the FLAG Foundation for the Arts; and a solo exhibition at the Gagosian that featured Twombly paintings and drawings from 1968 through 1990. It is curious that the work of an American abstract artist who lived most of his life in Italy, quoted Greek and Roman poets in his work, and has been dead for over a decade would find this much purchase at this moment in history. What do these three shows tell us about Twombly and his legacy? What do they tell us his popularity means about art in the US?

These questions and others were heavy with me when I visited The Writing’s on the Wall, the most cerebral of the three shows. I was curious what Hilton Als, the brilliant and beloved writer, critic, and curator, saw in Twombly, whose work he placed in conversation with art by Andy Warhol, David Salle, Judy Linn, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Willem de Kooning, Vija Celmins, Brice Marden, Rachel Harrison, Ina Archer, and many others. The term conversation is apropos because Als framed the show around the interplay of language and silence. “[F]or this exhibition,” he writes,

I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

That’s one reason Cy Twombly is here. He is one of the great disseminators and unpackers of language, of sound.

The piece Als selects as exemplary of Twombly’s unpacking is the gorgeous Untitled (1970), which he placed in the very center of the main room. At roughly five by six feet, Untitled commands an entire wall. One of Twombly’s blackboard paintings, executed in the late 1960s and early ’70s, it is a master class in movement and confusion. My eye sees six horizontal lines of something. I want to choose my noun correctly here. I see lines of writing. Lines of scribbles. Lines of cursive. Lines of music. Lines of waves, both water and sound. Lines of signs. Lines of primitive scrawls. I see circles, ovals, loops, nests, lassos. Do I see letters? Maybe some e’s or o’s. Or maybe just spirals.

While a Brice Marden piece in the exhibition indicates its debt to both visual and textual media with the title Letter Drawing I (2011), Twombly refuses to help us out with his Untitled. In fact, I know of only three blackboard paintings with titles. The earliest one, Cold Stream (1966), suggests currents, movements, oscillations. A creek. A river. A stream. Indeed, there is a “stream of consciousness” quality to a work like Untitled, which appears like a visual record of Twombly’s thinking—automatic, fluid, coursing.

If Twombly’s work inhabits a space at the edge of writing and painting, then it encourages a strange but gloriously synthetic act of seeing and reading. What does it mean for writing to be on a wall as opposed to on a page? Reading is private while viewing is public. In the gallery, I was watching other visitors looking at the Twombly at the same time. We all seemed to be trying to figure out his cryptic script, an experience that felt more like collectively reading a greeting card than engaging a poem. It was both dislocating and unifying.

The most surprising of the three shows, A Rose Is features works by Kay Rosen, James Lee Byars, Arakawa, and Anselm Kiefer, among others, with a monumental Twombly as its centerpiece. This time, it was The Rose III, a breathtaking painting from 2008. The scale of this painting deserves some ink. At over eight feet tall and roughly 25 feet long, it commands an entire room. An entire building, in fact. The Rose III is the middle painting of a five-part series that charts sunlight as it moves over three roses from morning until night. The FLAG Foundation was lucky enough to convince the owners to part with the key panel—the fulcrum—in the series. It is the only one to feature roses of two different colors. The two on the left are still dark from the morning, but the one on the right is illuminated by the sun passing overhead. To the right of the sunny rose is the first stanza from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke from his much beloved 1926 poetic sequence “Les Roses.” Known primarily for his work in German, Rilke composed hundreds of poems in French over the last years of his life. Twombly here offers a slightly altered translation of four lines from the eighth poem:

Overflowing with your dream
flower with so many others deep inside
wet as one who weeps—
you lean against the dawn.

In his transcription of Rilke’s quatrain, Twombly plays with line breaks and spelling. He also repeats words, overlaying one over another. It can be difficult to discern in photos of the painting, but Twombly actually writes the stanza twice—once largely and prominently in red, then again more subtly in yellow, almost as a shadow. As usual, Twombly’s handwriting is atrocious, just barely more legible than the scrawl of Untitled. He pens the word “dream” three times, twice in red and once in yellow. And does he misspell “wet” as “wett”? Or is that a handwriting error and correction? It is wonderfully unclear and brings a messy aura, a sense of tactility, to the piece.

What I love about Rose III is that the poem is not a caption for the roses, just as the roses are not illustrations of the poetry. They exist and signify on equal planes, creating a rich intertextuality, both visual and textual. Few artists are smarter about semiotics than Twombly, and this painting really pulls out all the stops. Along with the more obvious signifiers—roses, poetry, Rilke, language—I would add the color palette. Where the grayscale of the blackboard paintings foregrounds writing, scribbling, erasure, and even teaching, here the lush yellows and oranges, the deep purples, and that flat, uniform turquoise seem to signal a store of meaning beyond the direct referents of the rose, the sky, and the joyous cycle of the sun. I asked one of the curators of the show, Madeline DeFilippis, what color she thought the background was, and she told me “Tiffany blue.” As for the dripping roses, the literary critic and Twombly scholar Mary Jacobus claims that “Rilke’s opening line—‘Overflowing with your dream’ (‘De ton rêve trop plein’)—suggests a rose brimming over, unable to contain the night’s residue of dew and tears.” Roses can stand for so many things: beauty, royalty, sensuality, passion, sentimentality, romance, innocence. The paradox of the rose and the thorn is a classic trope for the inseparability of pleasure and pain, and to be sure, Twombly is playing with all of these loaded metaphors.

To me, Twombly is thinking primarily about poetry. He’s trying to make poetry, to evoke the way poetry evokes, by trafficking in the symbolism of poetry. Directly or not, he’s quoting Shakespeare (“a rose by any other name”). He’s quoting Gertrude Stein and Robert Burns. He’s quoting every awful poem you’ve ever written that included a rose. Or a thorn.

But really, he’s deep into Rilke. He’s reading the rose through the lens of Rilke, who might himself be reading the rose through the lens of myth. In Greek mythology, the rose is associated with Adonis, the god of rebirth, desire, and beauty, and Adonis is, not surprisingly, the subject of other works by Twombly. Poetry and roses and tears and Tiffany blue are over the top, and yet, somehow, Twombly saves the excesses of this painting from melodrama by the way he incorporates Rilke. The lines of poetry in that shaky script suggest a lack of confidence, perhaps even trepidation—an emotion fundamentally at odds with the effulgence of the painting, somehow achieving a balance of competing gestures.

Gagosian enjoys a rich history of mounting fantastic Twombly shows. The most recent one was no exception, featuring some rarely seen works on paper, a very cool sculpture, and some of the most exquisite blackboard paintings—especially stunning within the gallery’s high-ceilinged, skylighted room. Stepping off the elevator on the sixth floor, rounding a corner, and entering a huge atrium revealed nine vertical carbon-colored panels (Untitled, 1971) that appeared to be windows framing a night sky. Or the universe.

The panels themselves are roughly 10 feet tall and create the effect of standing in the Millennium Falcon while star streaks and comet trails stream around. The series asks to be read from left to right. The far-left panel is nearly blank, the background little more than blackish gray or grayish black with a couple of thin white lines trailing down. But as you move to the right, each panel takes on more and more white and even a little bit of red, which makes everything come alive. By the time you get to panel nine, the entire canvas is awash in white, as if a torrent of white water were slashing diagonally across the pane. It is as though your spaceship has just kicked into hyperdrive, and all the stars are swooshing by.

These panels, which comprise an entire wall, were flanked on facing walls by three further examples of the blackboard paintings (all Untitled, and none of which I’d seen in person before), ranging from 1969 to 1971—the years most would consider Twombly’s sweet spot. Even more than other works in the artist’s oeuvre, these are boldly austere and mysterious in some unutterable way. Often, the marks of the blackboard paintings are little more than spirals or coils. Cursive e’s. Connected o’s. But here, the letter forms float untethered from each other and appear less like letters from our alphabet than symbols from an ancient and wholly forgotten language. The scale is also smaller, more intimate, like a book or tablet. I found myself trying to read them, as though attempting to decipher some sacred text. Asemic. Calligraphic. In tension with the sense of the arcane, these works evoke, of course, a chalkboard—the accoutrement of instruction. It is as though we are here to learn, and yet everything is inscrutable.

One floor down, viewers encountered the deep tones of the much-beloved green paintings of the 1980s. Those who have visited the Menil in Houston will recognize this series. Pine green meets sea green meets moss green meets leaf green. Lake light. Moon mist. These paintings do not contain lines of poetry. No names of writers. No Rilke. No scribbles. And because it’s Twombly, that makes them feel more like traditional landscapes than if they’d been executed by a different artist. These are resolutely paintings rather than pages.

But it was the pages in this show that most captivated me—the 14 works on paper entitled Five Day Wait at Jiayuguan. Created in 1980, this series was exhibited at the Venice Biennale that year, but the individual images have not been displayed together since. I knew of these works and had seen reproductions in a small folio from 1981, but this was my first opportunity to encounter them in person. Created in response to a 1979 trip Twombly took through Russia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, the works are a mix of watercolor, pencil, crayon, and tempera, and they evoke a traveler’s diary or notebook.

What stands out about this project is how different it is from the rest of Twombly’s work, and yet it is still so clearly Twomblyesque. For instance, the individual pieces are relatively small. Almost all are 39 by 28 inches. And all but one are in portrait orientation, as opposed to landscape. In most, the images are executed on paper, many in watercolor, and stapled to a large white background. In the folio, the pieces had resembled large Polaroids, with larger white space at the bottom for notes or captions. In person, the works are clearly collage. Twombly does take advantage of the extra white space now and then, where he might scribble out a line of poetry or provide a title.

That is another unusual element—the titles. Nowhere else in his oeuvre will you come across a Twombly with a title like Tiger Hunt or Longing of Fire or Chilling Dreams. The titles are exotic, human, even bordering on helpful. This is one of the rare times in his work when Twombly was making art about the place he was in at the moment, the one he was presently passing through. He feels out of his element, like a tourist. Notes are dashed. Images are minimal, like a scrapbook. Two pieces in particular still have their hooks in me. Leaving the Land of Men appears to be little more than stained parchment, with some drops or splotches at the bottom and lower right corner and a stain in the middle of the page resembling a tumor. It is unsettling in its minimalism. Below the image, in classic Twombly handwriting, is this haiku-like message:

        when you Leave Jiayuguan
        You Leave the land of Men
                & enter the land of GHOSTS

Hanging next to it was The Desert, the only horizontal work in the series. The painting’s surface appears gray and windswept, like the desert sky. The following phrase is emblazoned in large block letters from one margin to the next:

        THE DESERT
                OF NO END

And then below that, written in much smaller block letters, this précis:

        (WITHOUT DESIRE
          WITHOUT MEMORY
          A NOTHINGNESS DEEPER THAN DEATH)

Twombly is a poet of the past, but nowhere in his vast body of work are there such overt evocations of mortality: “Ghosts”; “Desert of no end”; “Death.”

Like Emily Dickinson, Twombly tells the truth but tells it slant. He is a semiotician of indirectness. Circumlocution. Evasion. Erasure. So, the rather confessional content of these works is bracing. But so too are their formal qualities. The words in The Desert appear to be buried by the blowing sand, as if they are being occluded by time. In a lovely piece on the Gagosian show, Alfred Mac Adam closes his review with the following claim: “This is immortality.” I admire that conviction, though I might have said just the opposite: This is mortality.

I’d been thinking about prayer on the plane to New York to see these shows. Just before I left, I was sent a new book by photographer Tacita Dean entitled Why Cy—a series of close-up photographs of Twombly paintings accompanied by a small journal of Dean’s night spent in the Twombly Gallery at the Menil. Her titular exploration functioned as an organizing principle in my brain as I moved through the various Twombly exhibitions, and as I wondered about his impact on contemporary art. Dean describes encountering Twombly’s work in mystical terms. She talks of the Twombly gallery as a “chapel” in which she hears the “heartbeat of the gods.” For her, Twombly’s work goes beyond mere mark-making and enters the realm of the holy. In one entry, she exclaims, “We’re all circling Cy who is circling the ineffable.”

It was with that sense of ineffability, of inscrutability, that I saw the three shows over two days, and I was astonished by the way Twombly’s art so easily embodies opposites. It is both current and timeless. Accessible and elusive. Playful and mournful. I was also struck by how diverse his body of work is, especially when read against other artists who have tended toward a more singular style.

Equally striking when going through A Rose Is and The Writing’s on the Wall is how well Twombly pairs with a dizzying array of other artists, how chameleonic his work can be. In The Writing’s on the Wall, as I was standing next to two funny, untitled pieces by Christopher Wool from the early 1990s, featuring cryptic statements in his trademark black stencil lettering on white paper, I looked over at the large looping script of Twombly’s Untitled and immediately saw why Als had paired them. Wool’s lightness illuminates Twombly’s spontaneous whimsy. Wool breaks up his words vertically, making them more difficult to read, just as Twombly’s frustrating penmanship makes his “writing” difficult (impossible) to read. But at the same time, the Twombly piece spoke eloquently to Untitled #20, a gorgeous, blanched monochromatic grid by Agnes Martin from 1988, which hung to the left of Twombly’s Untitled. It helped me appreciate the restraint of Twombly: two colors, nothing but lines that, like Martin, are all about intersection. Positioned between the two was Vija Celmins’s sculpture of an eraser (Pink Pearl Eraser, 1966–67), which brought out Twombly’s pop sensibilities. I began to think of his swirls and scribbles and chalkboard as a cagey form of the readymade. I imagined Celmins had made her piece in order to erase Twombly’s. Her eraser is a clever wink to the literal handiwork of Twombly’s craft—its reliance on the line, on drawing—while Untitled lent Celmins’s and Martin’s works depth and nuance.

Perhaps we are just now learning how to see/read/internalize Twombly. I wonder if the lack of biographical presence in Twombly’s work was, for many years, a liability. I know many smart people who love art but not Twombly. They find him cold, aloof. One friend told me he feels like Twombly’s work “was made by a robot.” For many, his personality is absent, erased, scribbled out. Perhaps they feel the voices of the poets in his art silence his own. But this absence of biography can equally be read as a mode of humility. Of defacement. Of relegation. Many voices rather than just one. Many presences rather than the monolithic. There is a contingency in Twombly that I don’t find in Johns or Rauschenberg or Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock. He is always in conversation with others, as if his work is always already a collaboration. A quiet egoless collaboration with the past, the present, and the future.

“Where do you go when you look at a painting by Cy Twombly?” asks Tacita Dean. To the future? The past? Living voices. Dead voices. Text that has been written. Text erased. Poems yet to be written. Poems nearly forgotten. Twombly’s writing is both empty and full. Like his canvases.

What Twombly do you want? What if he is collaborating with you right now?

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Featured image: Cy Twombly. Installation view of A Rose Is at the FLAG Art Foundation, 2025. Photography by Steven Probert.