Atwitter for Twombly

In his memoir, All the Beauty in the World, a Met security guard shows us how to fall in love with art

Several years ago, a prominent journalist friend in New York told me that it’s hard to write about art. I’d just sent him a little essay I wrote about the simultaneous exhibitions of Jasper Johns in Philadelphia and New York. I think he was trying to be encouraging.

I was reminded of our conversation recently while reading All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley. Mr. Bringley, who spent 10 years working as a security guard at the Met, writes movingly about the art he watched over and about its healing power following the death of his brother, Tom.

The memoir is written in strikingly kind language, welcoming of anyone interested in art. The author is appreciative of quiet time to reflect and to study whichever works of art fall into his line of sight. He is patient when visitor pulls out a cell phone even though they shouldn’t and approachable when anyone has a question, no matter how silly.

So often, however, fine art can be seen, or portrayed, as tres chic, not really appreciated or understood by the masses. A video on social media shows two dandies arriving at a gallery with kisses on the cheek while a homeless artist in the background looks on. It’s message is clear, there is and always has been a wealth gap between artist and patron.

Bringley cringes at the notion that fine art is for a certain class of people in the way photographer Bill Cunningham once did in the world of fashion.

I learn not only to choke back any snobbish impulses I might have, but to dismiss them as stupid and absurd. None of us knows much of anything about this subject—the world and all of its beauty. I might know the dates of Michelangelo’s birth and death, but imagine how overwhelmed by ignorance I would be in his workshop or in a Persian miniaturist’s or in a Navajo basket weaver’s…..They, too, would be baffled inside the Met.

The art and literary critic William Deresiewisz writes an interesting perspective on this topic in his article, “How Art Lost Its Way, an unserious culture lacks the ability to sustain high art.” His article is a tribute to art critics such as Arlene Croce and John Leonard, who wrote “ambitious criticism.”

“What all those very different figures had in common aside from the excellence of their prose and this is what distinguishes their criticism from most of what passes for cultural discourse today is that their writing was grounded in a direct encounter with the work. They weren't distracted by moralistic agendas topical talking points or biographical chitchat. They didn't write ‘takes.’”

Nevertheless, in the comments section after the article, one reader called these critics, “moral scolds.”

Bringley’s method for approaching a work of art is something simple and wonderful. “I resist the temptation to hunt right away for something singular about a work, the “big deal” that draws the focus of textbook writers. To look for distinctive characteristics is to ignore the greater part of what a work of art is. “

Bringley writes that a portrait by a master is beautiful because of traits peculiar to the artist’s genius, but also the colors, shapes, faces and tumbling curls. He suggests that we shouldn’t think that a piece is good or bad or Baroque or what it means.

“Art needs to perform its work on us.”

He writes that his response to a favorite painting, The Harvesters, felt as though it was trapped inside his chest, like a bird fluttering.

I recognized that fluttering recently while visiting The Menil Gallery in Houston, an archipelago of buildings nestled among giant live oaks in a historic neighborhood.

I’d come specifically to spend an afternoon with the Menil’s collection of Cy Twombly paintings and sculptures, which have fascinated me since moving to Lexington, Virginia, three years ago. Twombly hails from Lexington, a small college town located in the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies of Appalachia.

The Cy Twombly Gallery is a treasure trove of sculpture and paintings housed in a Renzo Piano-design building. Upon entering, it’s difficult not to be drawn immediately to the right where the enormous canvases of Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) 1994. Despite it size, it spare on the left and builds toward increasingly colorful clouds on the right with textual scribblings here and there. On the central canvas, Twombly quotes the poet John Keats’ line, “On mists in idleness,” perhaps a title he was thinking of for the painting.

I was drawn again and again to Twombly’s inscription of the name, “Orpheus,” the Greek musician. Sitting on a bench across from the painting, I could feel the fluttering bird Bringley describes in my chest.

That fluttering clearly affected another man, the poet Dean Rader, who published a beautiful collection of poems entitled, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. In his “Pentimento” at the end, Rader reflects on the artist he has been taken with for decades.

Rader writes that Twombly’s work blurs the line between text and image. The artist refuses to choose between the two modes of expression.

“How can so little say so much? How can the same drawing resemble both urban graffiti and a sacred illuminated text? How can one thing both ask to be read and refused to be read?"

For the painting Beyond (A Space for Passing) Part X, 1971, Rader’s poem, System:

black line

blank page

did I write page? I meant canvas [so I typed page]

[I am beginning to believe that everything might be mark of its own making]

did I write write? I meant draw [watch me write line]

On the day I visited the gallery, artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean began a showing of Edwin Parker, 2011, a 16mm film in which we become a fly on the wall inside Cy Twombly’s studio in Lexington, Virginia, and at lunch at the Lexington Restaurant. It was shot just nine months before his death.

Twombly’s given name was Edwin Parker. He was, according to Dean “famously private,” though the people I know in Lexington have always spoken of him as kind and friendly, often walking the street or driving through Rockbridge County looking at the countryside.

“Dean used these simple activities to reflect on the cerebral work of an artist and the quiet, everyday moments that lead to acts of creation.”

How could Twombly’s fiddling with art books and a newspaper, inspecting a sculpture, chatting with friends, ordering apple sauce to go with his turkey sandwich be mesmerizing, unless you love his art and wish to know him better.

Again, Mr. Bringley: “Art is about both the plainness and the mystery, reminding us of the obvious, exploring the overlooked.”