treatise on the veil
I caught this Cy Twombly exhibition in New York just at the end of its run. The museum happened to be open on Monday due to the Martin Luther King holiday.
I’ve been getting interested in Cy Twombly on Pinterest because of his sketchiness and inclusion of handwriting in his work.
This monumental Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) is rarely exhibited because of its size.
Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil
I couldn’t take pictures in the gallery but I grabbed this one from the website.
Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil
I sketched out some couplets to capture my first reactions to the Treatise.
An imperfectly cleaned chalkboard
that opens to soft drips and imperfect coatings
At “eye-level” imperfectly applied lines of chalk
two evanescent traces of blue and blue
Scribbling – why? why is the artist’s
handwriting so atrocious?
Conscious enough to notice a mistake
in the interpretive panels –
I think they wrote 4
whereas he was writing 8
why one person’s traces preserved
the others a vast garbage heap?
I liked the patched together nature of the studies, loaded down with tape and scribbling, as well as stamped with dates and numerals. Trying to organize the nature of art.