but a photo tucked at the end of an obscure catalogue, and the drawings that overlap with those days, a vision of a self, intimate and true: the life that went into the work, the work that went into the life.

“Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life,”

Maybe this, too, is what Twombly teaches. To embrace failure. To love absence.

Twombly’s sexuality, in and of itself, isn’t interesting. What’s remarkable is how, even after his death, it is still ignored or resisted or denied.

had relationships with one another; these relationships not only informed their thinking about audience and meaning-making in a context of grave constraint,

“Living, looking, making:” writes David Sylvester, “Twombly seems to be someone for whom there is no break between these.”

Understanding Twombly’s art in no way depends on knowing his sexuality; the fact of Twombly’s complicated sexuality hardly leads to any easy explanations.

but Twombly is working in a tradition that associates homosexuality with an ideal human freedom.”

Isn’t that the way all love affairs run—from dream and cloud-journey to earth-firmness?”1 I’m not the same man as I was that night. Now, I know too much.