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 look around them with puzzled expressions. Didn’t that big sign at the entrance promise an exhibition of drawings? When they return to the label for help, they learn that the complex palimpsest before them is made of “synthetic polymer paint, crayon, and cut-and-pasted paper on paper,” none of which seems to reassure the perplexed. But the c ...

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