Cy Twombly was “not an easy artist,” Dominique de Menil once said of the late abstract expressionist.

“He goes against the grain,” the legendary Houston philanthropist and patron of the arts told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in March 1995. “He just scribbles and things come to his mind—and he constantly evokes the past or great prophets or religious people. He travels in history, you see. He is the opposite of a teacher who—bang, bang, bang—gives dates. But he evokes the past much better than a teacher would—because to him it’s alive.”

She expressed these words of praise a month after the grand opening of the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Gallery. True to the de Menils’ general philosophy of promoting game-changing artists during their lifetimes, the
gallery is dedicated to showcasing 32 of the acclaimed artist’s works—mainly paintings and sculptures—from 1953 to 2004. Architect Renzo Piano, who created the main Menil Collection building across the street, also designed the 12,760-square-foot gallery.

Three decades later, the Menil plans to commemorate the anniversary through a series of performances and lectures on Twombly’s legacy. Tacita Dean: Blind Folly, a survey of the British artist’s works, opened in October and runs concurrently with the milestone until April 19, 2025. This was an intentional choice on the Menil’s part, as Dean and Twombly shared a close friendship during his lifetime. Details for more 2025 Twombly programming are available via the website.

The initial rumblings of a space dedicated exclusively to Twombly began as far back as 1987. It took the artist about a year to consider and respond to the offer. Menil assistant director (and later director) Paul Winkler and then-director Walter Hopps visited the artist in Rome to begin the planning process in 1989.

Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, who worked as a conservator at the Menil for over 20 years until her departure for New York’s Whitney Museum in 2001, worked closely with Twombly on ensuring that all of his works made it safely from his studio in Rome to Houston. Though American—specifically, Virginian—Twombly lived in Italy for much of his life and died there in 2011 at the age of 83.

Along with Winkler, Mancusi-Ungaro traveled to Rome in 1992 to help select the pieces for display and draw up the necessary shipping and preservation logistics. Then she and her team took painstaking care to construct and display everything to Twombly’s specifications back in Houston.

“We also felt it was a responsibility to maintain and preserve all the original material on the work,” she says. “That means the original stretchers, any kind of original fold lines, anything that has to do with the work. The inherent qualities needed to be preserved as well as documented. We documented that, both in terms of making notes and taking photographs. Cy also agreed to do an artist documentation program interview with me.”

Mancusi-Ungaro is currently writing a book about her working relationship with Twombly and the early days when the gallery was still in the planning phases. She is also scheduled to appear at the 30th anniversary festivities in Houston.

In Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil, edited by Josef Helfenstein and Laureen Schipsi, Winkler shares that Twombly was fully engaged in the design of his gallery. “It should be sky lit with no windows,” Winkler writes. “The outside should be fairly abstract or neutral. He wanted wide-plank wood floors, which were not to be too yellow, with the floors for the entrance room in a different material.”

Rebecca Rabinow, the current director of the Menil, notes how closely Piano and Twombly collaborated on the lighting aspect of the gallery’s architecture, which presents the artist’s works in a context evoking the Italian studio where he crafted them. It’s a detail that many would overlook upon entering, but one that’s entirely essential to the experience.

“I think some people go into museums and they’re looking at the art, but it’s a worthwhile exercise for someone who’s interested to come into the different buildings and see how light is treated,” she says.

A visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery invites such deep inquiry, and not just between the interplay of light and art. Abstract expressionism—the artistic movement in which Twombly primarily made his name—has an unfair reputation as, to put it bluntly, “my kid could paint that.” Twombly’s paintings and sculptures are hardly a series of dismissible scribbles and blobs.

His art presents viewers with a scavenger hunt, an afternoon spent with meditative music in your earbuds and a tight eye on the piece in front of you. The closer you look, the more you find buried. Snippets of poetry, notes on current and upcoming projects, crayon marks covered up by thick applications of house paint, graphite lines gouged into canvas: All of these can be unearthed like little visual treasures, glimpses into Twombly’s preoccupations with color, texture, and the classics.

Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) takes up an entire wall—and could take up an entire day on deciphering alone. Rabinow points out that it contains more than a dozen bits of poetry. Another untitled series initially appears as chalk scribbles on a board. Get closer and you eventually notice how neither slate nor chalk was used in the production of the pieces. It’s all carefully layered paint and crayon and pencil, applied with such skill it can trick the eye into believing it’s looking at an entirely different medium.

“While commercial and critical success came late to [Twombly], he became a very influential artist in part because he balanced tradition of abstract expressionism with a passion for history and classical mythology and poetry,” Rabinow says. “This interest in abstraction, but also an interest in found objects, coupled with this love of poetry, the history of places, ancient graffiti…it’s all reflected in his artwork.”

Tacita Dean was one such artist who considered Twombly’s works revelatory. To prepare for Blind Folly, she was gifted with the rare honor of both a residency and permission to spend an entire night inside the Cy Twombly Gallery. There, alone, she absorbed the handiwork of her close friend and inspiration, the man whose drawings would go on to permanently shape her own views of a simple line’s potential.

“A lot of [Twombly’s] themes also spoke to her and are very much a part of her work, like this idea of how art could play with what is anachronistic,” says Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil and author of Blind Folly or How Tacita Dean Draws. “They both…have this beautiful assortment of references to history, to literature, to ancient culture that very much forms the basis of their work.”

Blind Folly, which White curated, features a selection of Dean’s works from across her lifetime in the arts, including 16mm film, photography, printmaking, and more. It is also the first major showing of Dean’s work in the United States. Running the show as part of the 30th anniversary celebration highlights what White says is a special connection between Dean and Twombly.

Local artists also look to Twombly to reinvigorate their own imaginations. Rabinow speaks of multiple composers who moved to the city specifically to pen music reflecting on how the gallery touched them, and the Menil has previously partnered with former Houston Poet Laureate Outspoken Bean to craft and present spoken-word performances in direct response to Twombly’s art. She calls the Cy Twombly Gallery “a pilgrimage site” for an interdisciplinary range of working creatives seeking a new spark, which in kind nurtures arts tourism that bolsters the local economy.

To Rabinow, Twombly’s works lend themselves to individualized interpretations of what he means to say to an audience, which contributes to his ongoing popularity and influence.

“Some of [his] earliest paintings…allude to layers of grime and graffiti that he would have seen the first time he traveled to Italy and North Africa. It’s these layers of history. If he writes a word, sometimes he’ll paint over it, so you just see just some essence of it,” she says. “To me, that is an artist who is trying to leave their work open to interpretation.”

Rabinow adds that over the past 30 years, the Cy Twombly Gallery’s growth doesn’t exactly center…well…growing, or at least or adding to the building. The overarching goals involve acquiring new Twombly works to exhibit, as well as expanding on how the collection has influenced and inspired people.

This perspective firmly roots itself in three decades of commitment to promoting Twombly as a significant figure both in, as well as beyond, the abstract expressionist niche, a man whose curiosity-driven vision forever changed the course of the Houston art scene.