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

We understand the experience of living in a contingent world, the dangers of wind or rainstorms, of sickness or terrible loss. We recognize this feeling of being young: to speak and be unheard, of having something to say and no ear in which to whisper it.

a poet in paint and that it will be a strong poetry as he is not easily changed from his purpose.”

What Twombly collected were the things already made, the “richnesses” of the world—vases, tapestries, broken sculptures, printed books; this is one part of his genius, the words and things of others, not arranged but composed.

The house as music and Twombly as the conductor. The maestro before the ancient world, gathering and collecting.

“dragging and stroking the paint.” In this Twombly is the inheritor of the Abstract Expressionist tradition: intense physicality, immersion in the sensory process, speed.

The desire isn’t so much to de-skill his hand or eye, as to make that very skill and technique invisible. The effort to make art look effortless, though, is never simple. Every choice matters, the paintings seem to say. Every action has consequences.

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

“It is very difficult to talk about an artist,” said poet Octavio Paz about Cy Twombly, “always we are talking about another way of trying to understand a secret.”9 The secret life of making, I think he means, is not just the color as it moves from brush or hand to surface, but how an idea travels across the surfaces of a mind. The secret life of