Stephen Maine reviews Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, on view through January 25, 2015.
Maine writes: "On loan to The Morgan Libraryfrom the Menil Collection ... Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) ... is immersive, sensuous and pictorial. Roughly ten by 33 feet, it was painted in Rome in 1970 and features the reductive gray-and-white palette Twombly had by that time been working with for several years. Photographs of these paintings often accentuate the gray’s bluish undertone, making it appear denser than it is; the Menil canvas’s enormous expanse of translucent, brushy paint evokes not a chalkboard but thick smoke or deep shadow... twelve untitled drawings ... appear to be studies and are presented, with great success, as fully resolved works. Laced even more abundantly than the painting with Twombly’s distinctive, ad-hoc calligraphic scrawl, they incorporate scribbles, smudges, erasures and rubber-stampings, as well as multi-panel collage structures."
