I escaped the midday heat last Tuesday inside the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s museum for contemporary art.  There I crept through the cool, dark galleries full of cool, dark sculptures and installations.  Then, at the end, I found myself in a light-filled room with three enormous Cy Twombly canvases.  In contrast with the other art, terse assemblies of plywood, steel, felt and humming neon lights, they had a sweet, expansive lyricism.  It made me think of Twombly as more than a conceptual artist who fetishized the acts of drawing and making, and, for the first time, as a painter.  So I was sad to heard that he died earlier this week at the age of 83 at this home in Rome.

The canvases in Berlin are textural and textual.  Each is a blank field of white paint layered with scrawls, splotches and writing, and then more white paint.  The surfaces float in and out of focus; they’re ephemeral and engaging.  There is, across one, in Twombly’s looping script, “I am Thyrsis of Etna/blessed with a fine voice,” and it seems less like a literary allusion than a cry for someone, anyone, to listen and bear witness.  These canvases have at their heart an elemental need for expression.