Thursday night’s memorial for Cy Twombly at The Menil Collection was a solemn yet celebratory affair, as some of the top names in the art world paid tribute to the legendary life and career of the art icon, who died in Rome this summer after a battle with cancer.

Since his earliest shows in the 1950s, Twombly was always hard to categorize as an artist. He was too young and too literary to be grouped with the Abstract Expressionists and too ethereal to be a Pop Artist. His massive canvases filled with intricate scribbles and classical verse confounded critics and collectors alike.

After hearing speakers so intimately involved in his life – as well as those acquainted only with his work – the dust of controversy surrounding Twombly’s challenging work appeared to settle.

Menil director Josef Helfenstein introduced the evening’s service with a brief overview of the artist’s life, which began in Lexington, Va., in 1928. Twombly studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Black Mountain College before relocating to New York City, where he forged life-long relationships with the equally uncategorizable artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Dia Art Foundation director Phillippe Vergne discussed the “baroque violence” of Twombly’s early work – the “profane abandon” and “absolute jubilation” that must have gone into vivid pieces from the early 1960s like The Bay of Naples and The Triumph of Galatea, both on view at The Menil’s Twombly Gallery across the street.

The artist’s son, painter-sculptor Alessandro Twombly, followed Vergne’s insights with stories of his father’s travels throughout Mexico, Afghanistan, Yemen and Italy, where Cy Twombly relocated in 1957.

Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, described the artist’s body of work with a poem by Wallace Stevens titled, “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

“Poetry is the subject of the poem,” she read from Stevens, concluding that the same stance can be taken towards the artist’s art. “By extension, we can say that art is the subject of the painting or sculpture – the work of Cy Twombly exemplifies this modern truth.”

Heiner Friedrich, co-founder of Dia Art Foundation, remembered his first chance encounter with the artist at a Venitian piazza in 1964.

“He had no name, no wealth, and no fame whatsoever then,” he said. “When his paintings appeared in public there was contempt, even aggressive contempt. Yet, Cy maintained the strongest certainties.”

Noted Houston-based artist and jazz historian Tierney Malone discussed Twombly’s work in relation to music, comparing his paintings and sculptures to the free jazz of Ornette Coleman.

“Seeing his chalk drawings of the late '60s and early '70s,” he said, “was the first time I heard music emanate from works of art.” Several of the artist’s blackboard paintings are on view at the Twombly Gallery.

Former Menil conservationist Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, now at the Whitney Museum and Harvard Art Museum, talked about her close working relationship with Twombly, which involved transporting works-in-progress between Houston and the studio he maintained in Virginia.

“Cy painted with the canvas nailed to the wall and he’d constantly paint off the edge,” she recalled fondly. “He never indicated were the fabric should fold on the stretcher bars. When I asked him about that, he said ‘Oh, you decide.’”

Alvia Wardlaw, director of the Texas Southern University Museum, finished the service with a reading from “The Keeper of Sheep” by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, one of Twombly’s favorite writers.

“What matters is to know how to see, to know without thinking,” she read from the 1914 poem. “This requires deep study, lessons in unlearning.”

Known for speaking very little about his work, Twombly was lucky to have a circle of admirers to capture his complex legacy so succinctly.