Houston already knows this, so this is for the rest of the art-loving, trainspotting Texans that keep tabs on such things: Last Sunday a museum goer at the Menil Collection backed into a Cy Twombly sculpture and knocked it over. Everyone knows that sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting. (Ad Reinhardt, comedian.)
John Hovig took the above photo and Robert Boyd posted it on his blog The Great God Pan is Dead.
It was, by all accounts, an accident. No one was hurt. The 1954 untitled piece is now with the museum’s conservation team. I can’t tell exactly from the photo and title but I believe it’s this one:
And here is a nice picture of Dominique de Menil and Twombly in 1995.
3 comments
That is the sculpture, yes. The brown twine-bound object fixed between the two wooden spoons went flying. One or more of the mirrors were shattered. The blurry photo doesn’t show it (not even the higher-resolution version on Robert Boyd’s site), but my memory is that there were shards of glass strewn across the middle of the frame. The light-brown object in the center of the shot is a hand-held sweeper resting aside a black metal dustpan, presumably to fix said shardage.
Given that it was a Cy Twombley piece, if they left it on the floor, it might have gone unnoticed.
It’s now an installation – and an improvement.