William Kentridge, Drawing from Zeno Writing (2002) © 2009 William Kentridge

The first thing we see, on entering “Compass in Hand: Selections from the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is a large Cy Twombly: a confrontational tangle of red, orange, green, and ochre clusters and cascading drips of pink and red.[1] Visitors are drawn to the work—as the curators obviously intended them to be—but I’ve watched many of them study the Twombly closely and then lo ...