FROM THE PRESS RELEASE

HOUSTON—January 29, 2025—Rebecca Rabinow, Director, The Menil Collection, today announced extremely significant donations of works by a single artist to the museum: two rare early paintings and 121 drawings by Cy Twombly (1928-2011), all given by the Cy Twombly Foundation. Underscoring the museum’s importance as an international destination for the study, presentation, and appreciation of Twombly’s work, the gifts celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Menil’s Cy Twombly Gallery. Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the freestanding building was inaugurated in February 1995.

Gift of Paintings

The two gifted paintings, Volubilus, 1953, and Untitled, 1954, have been on long-term loan to the Menil. They are early keystones in the Cy Twombly Gallery’s presentation of five decades of Twombly’s paintings and sculptures, from the formative period of his career in the 1950s to the epic painting made toward the end of his life when he was investigating themes of loss and the passage of time.

Volubilus, titled after the site of an ancient city that the artist visited in present-day Morocco, has arch-like forms drawn in the wet paint that recall Roman-era architecture. During his first visit to Europe, Twombly drew inspiration from ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, classical literature, and poetry. In this painting, to achieve the patina of age, he mixed dirt or tar into pigment to create what he referred to as “eroded surfaces.”

Untitled, 1954, a cream-colored painting with loose graphite scrawls scratched into the surface, comes from an experimental period. While Twombly was serving in the U.S. Army as a cryptologist, he began drawing in the dark to understand how a gesture could convey emotions. He explained that “the line is the feeling from a soft dreamy thing to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.”

Gift of Drawings

The Foundation’s landmark gift of 121 of Twombly’s drawings vastly expands the holdings and transforms the Menil’s ability to exhibit and study this aspect of the artist’s practice, while celebrating the museum’s nearly two decades of investment through the Menil Drawing Institute in elevating the visibility of drawing and its centrality in the lives of artists, as well as its crucial role in modern and contemporary artistic culture.

The gift covers fifty years, from 1954 to 2005, with some of the drawings sharing motifs and themes with paintings in the Menil’sholdings. Taken as a whole, the drawings offer enormous potential for display, teaching, and research. They are characteristic of Twombly’s oeuvre in that they feature a broad range of materials, from graphite to oil paint; techniques such as drawing and collage; and themes that are fundamental to his entire practice, such as classical antiquity, eroticism, and nature.

Nicola Del Roscio, President of the Cy Twombly Foundation, said, “The Cy Twombly Foundation is pleased to offer these gifts of art to the Menil Collection in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the artist’s eponymous gallery as a “Study Collection,” fostering the scientific research on Cy Twombly's work and preserving his legacy. Making these key works accessible to scholars, researchers, and the public at a free museum will help achieve the Foundation’s goal of encouraging a deeper and broader appreciation of the artist.”

For further information:
The Menil Collection, Houston
menil.org