James Panero, “artist foundations follow no industry standards, are allowed to operate in complete secrecy,

Perhaps, in these wordless writings, these erasures and overwriting, these loops and doodles, we have the “minutely varied record of passing feeling and thought,” an attempt to capture the fleeting sensations of our daily lives.7 This everyday inability to say what we want to say—our quiet rages and anxieties and desires. Our words come out wrong.

“But the posthumous eavesdropping,” Storr writes, “reveals a universally affecting tenderness that offsets any sense of being an unwelcome intruder in the private lives of others. And are not literature and life itself full of such triangulations between intimates and strangers.”

Twombly’s willingness to be photographed—or be the subject of profiles—seems not so different, a kind of instruction in how to be seen, a desire for control.

I need to talk to her. But we can’t. And so we keep looking. We invent. We remember. We look again.

He radiated an aura of lonesomeness and melancholy, but he also seemed to be entirely self-contained.

different kind of free and easy hand. One senses the emotions—desire and longing and nostalgia—in the flow of paint,

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.

Those lines are equally true of Twombly’s own personality, his oscillations between passion and detachment, presence and absence.