TheMuseum of Modern Art's Titus Theater was close to full Tuesday morning as alarge crowd attended a memorial service for the painter Cy Twombly, who diedthis summer in Rome at the age of 83. ThoughTwombly had been struggling with cancer for several years, his passing in Julycame as unexpected news — even to friends and colleagues with whom he was quiteclose — and the loss still resonated at the gathering. 

In his opening remarks, director Glenn Lowrycalled Twombly'srelationship with MoMA one of uncommonwarmth and longevity, pointing out that the museum has been collecting his paintings since1953, continuing to acquire new works of his into the new century. When it came to Twombly's sculpture, however, MoMA's appreciation was more of a "delayed reaction," said curator AnnTemkin. As she said in her eulogy, "It think itamused him to see work appreciated in which he had had confidence fordecades."

Since May, a stellar show of his white painted sculptures has been ondisplay on the museum's forth floor. Talking about them at a reception following the ceremony hosted by Larry Gagosian, Twombly's dealer, Temkin remarked that the sculptures havesince taken on "the presence of Cy."

That presence could be felt, too, as friends and admirers gathered in the lower theater to the strains of a string quartetplaying Franz Listz's "Liebestraum." Among the speakers was thephotographer Sally Mann, also from Twombly's home town of Lexington, Virginia,who quoted the artist's reference to himself and the painter Robert Rauschenbergas "the dickheads from Dixie." There was knowing laughter when sheremarked that New Yorkers expect artists from the South to talk and act"like characters from a Tennessee Williams play" — a quality the refined and continental Twombly actually retained, in small part, throughout his life. His upbringing in the South, Mann said, also explained why he was so drawn to Europe, inparticular Italy, where the artist spent much of his later years: both places are defined by weathered traditions and a history of vanquishment. The South, in turn, had "a dimensionof old civilizations" for Twombly because it had known defeat.

Thatso eminently modern a painter as Twombly could have been fascinated withthe old — really, the ancient — world was on the minds of virtuallyevery invited speaker. Josef Helfenstein, the director of the Cy TwomblyGallery at Houston's Menil Collection, highlighted the artist's attachmentto the "much older legacy of European classical culture," with his work holding "the past and the present simultaneously in aprecarious state of balance." In a particularly florid and fast-movingeulogy, the art historian Simon Schama sought to capture the spirit ofTwombly's work with references ranging from Homer to the 20th-century Welshpoet Dylan Thomas, describing his paintings as "a disorderly reach intothe remote past."

Echoingthe theme of historical polarity in Twombly's art was Louvre director Henri Loyrette, who worked closely with Twomblyas he became the third contemporary artist to create a permanentinstallation in the museum — a ceiling painting for theSalle des Bronzes that was completed in March 2010. Even when creating a workthat stood as "a summation of the Louvre's entire history," Twombly was a vigorously forward-thinking artist, Loyrette said, forever laboring atan "endless quest for the new."

Jeff Koons also made referenceto the classical tradition in his eulogy. "Cy's work seems to begin in Plato's cave," he said."His works define themselves in a dialogue of what it means to behuman." Koons said his own work was directly inspired byTwombly's later paintings, in particular the "Bacchus" series. "I was given thechance by Cy's generosity to walk out of Plato's cave, too," he said, adding that Twombly's art brings viewers "into contactwith what our hopes are."

Twombly was fascinated with poetry, particularly the work of Stéphane Mallarmé and John Keats, and it was the poet Mark Strand who lent a coda to the ceremony by reading fragments from poems that appear in the artist's paintings, including Rainer Maria Rilke's cycle "The Roses." Strand closed with a recitation of his own poem, "The End":

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,

Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.