Cy Twombly didn’t like the publicity mill. He rarely gave interviews, didn’t read critics, and shunned his public. “I swear if I had to do this over again,” he said, “I would just do the paintings and never show them.” The man who was once called the greatest painter after Picasso only wrote one sentence about his art. It appeared in a short essay from 1957 and reads: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Twombly’s close relationships with other artists—Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, for instance— encouraged his inclination toward abstraction, his mix of calligraphy with graffiti. This exhibition at the Menil moves from the 1950s to the 1980s, and covers themes of eroticism, landscape, and nature. On view for the first time are two untitled pieces that evoke Twombly’s famous “blackboard paintings.” —Maggie Turner