New Cy Twombly drawings at the Menil

Houston just got a rare kind of museum show: not the big, loud Cy Twombly paintings people post on Instagram, but a drawing exhibition built from a 2025 gift of 121 works that now makes the Menil Collection the largest holder of Twombly drawings outside his foundation. The exhibition itself opened at the Menil Drawing Institute on March 27 and runs through August 9, 2026. (menil.org, menil.org) What you actually see on the walls is tighter than the headline number: the Menil selected 27 works, or about 30 in its press language, from that larger gift. The point is not a greatest-hits survey but a close look at how Twombly moved from graphite line to collage, oil paint, and handmade paper across roughly three decades. (menil.org, menil.org) Twombly can look like scribble if you meet him cold. But his work is usually built from fragments of handwriting, classical names, smudges, loops, and erasures, like a notebook page that somehow turned into history painting. (menil.org, apollo-magazine.com) That is why a drawing show matters more than it might for another artist. On paper, you can see the pressure changes, the hesitation, the pasted pieces, and the way a line gets tested before it becomes part of the myth-heavy paintings people know best. (observer.com, menil.org) The Menil is also not a random venue for this. Its Cy Twombly Gallery opened in 1995 in a building designed by Renzo Piano with input from Twombly himself, so Houston has been one of the artist’s key museum homes for three decades. (menil.org, menil.org) The 2025 gift was timed to that 30th anniversary and included not just 121 drawings but two paintings. That turns this exhibition into the public debut of a much bigger shift: the Menil is becoming an even more important research center for Twombly, not just a place with a famous satellite gallery. (menil.org, menil.org) The date range inside the show matters too. The works run from 1954 to 1983 or, in Menil’s broader description, from the 1950s to the 1980s, which lets you watch Twombly move from lean early marks toward the more sensual, atmospheric surfaces of his later years. (menil.org, menil.org) Menil’s guide points to the recurring subjects that hold the selection together: classical antiquity, eroticism, and nature. Those themes are the reason a sheet with a few words, a scrawl, or a single bloom-like form can feel less like a sketch and more like a poem with half the lines torn out. (menil.org, gagosian.com) A review in Observer says some of the 121 donated works had never been shown before, which gives the exhibition an extra pull for people who thought they already knew Twombly. Even if only a fraction are on view now, the larger donation means Houston will likely be unpacking new angles on his work for years. (observer.com, menil.org) If you go, the practical detail is simple: this is at the Menil Drawing Institute, not the separate Cy Twombly Gallery, and it stays up through August 9, 2026. It is the kind of show where twenty-seven works can take longer than a blockbuster, because every smear and penciled word is doing the work of a whole wall-sized canvas. (menil.org, menil.org)