CY TWOMBLY THE HUMANIST

Spotlight

"I suppose people start off by being irritated," Cy Twombly has noted about the public's response to his oeuvre, "but in the end they can't resist the temptation to join in." At an Italian gallery, a lady once kissed a picture, leaving her lipstick stain right beside the rosy smears already encrusting his canvas. An even more carnal reaction came from a nubile Frenchwoman visiting the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston. Standing before the enormous, elegiac Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor, she suddenly stripped off her clothes. Twombly, of course, is the one most bared by his work. As American as baseball itself—in the 20s his father pitched for the Chicago White Sox—this native Virginian is at the same time so steeped in old-world culture that he took a Roman wife, moved into a Borgia palazzo, brought up his only child to speak Latin, and will soon paint a ceiling at the Louvre. Though Twombly's pictures allude obsessively to classical mythology (.Empire of Flora), literature (Fifty Days at llliam), and the old masters (School of Athens), they also incorporate furtive boys'-room graffiti of penises and thatchy glyphs of vaginas, crude as those drawn by the Neolithic cave artists of Lascaux. Maybe it's Twombly's timelessly autographic self-referencing that's enabled him to sustain such a vigorous career trajectory. An auction-house astronaut—Twombly's current record is $8.7 million—the rangy, timorous 78-year-old has offered at least one laconic explanation of his decision to become an artist: "You could do what you want, go where you want at any time of the day, if you've got a couple of dollars."

AMY FINE COLLINS