Cy Twombly: Untitled Part V (A Painting in 9 Parts), 1988 ,

If "painting" died all those eons ago, the Cy Twombly Gallery resonates with the most beautiful ghosts of the form.

TI visited the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston this weekend. The gallery (and it's interesting that it was not named a museum) was literally across the street from the magnificent Menil Collection housed in that flawlessly pitched Renzo Piano building. The Cy Twombly Gallery houses a concise collection of the artists work and yet in its concision, you still manage to acquire a sense of a wide spectrum retrospective of the body of work evolved by Twombly. Even better is the intimacy the space affords, with it's filtered natural light and its unsupervised rooms. A viewer can get so close to the canvases, sculptural works and drawings as to see the cracks and webwork , the patina and tones of brushstrokes and markings.

The build-up of that microcosm of details and inflections is the new information you leave with. That color control and that private visual language that writer David Slyvester found suggestive of "a trembling stillness" takes on the resonance of painstaking construction against a persistence of vision. I didn't touch but the solitude and magnificence of so much Twombly in so serene a setting just sweeps you away by the magnitude of the generosity involved. If "painting" died all those eons ago, the Cy Twombly Gallery resonates with the most beautiful ghosts of the form.