Does art always have to go deep?  The Kohlhaas Curtain, the Frank Stella - Santiago Calatrava collaboration on view now at the New National Gallery in Berlin, makes me feel that it doesn’t.  Big, bright and bold, the installation consists of nearly 100 linear feet of paintings on white tarp (by Stella) wrapped inside and outside a giant wire drum (by Calatrava) that’s suspended in the center of the glass-box gallery (by architect Mies van der Rohe).

The paintings might not be so compelling in themselves, but as displayed in the round like this they energize the gallery, drawing visitors forward while keeping the majestic panoramas along the edge of the building clear. The Curtain is installed at just the right height, so that guests can wander underneath and, for a few minutes, get lost inside. The artwork adds a welcome bit of funk to the archly elegant gallery. It pleases the eye, doesn’t get in the way, and doesn’t require too much thought.  It’s the finest kind of decorator art.

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.