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Lot Essay
Cy Twombly's Untitled (Lexington, Virginia) was created in 1959 while the artist was staying in his native Lexington, Virginia. This picture is one of ten that Twombly made there during what Kirk Varnedoe would later refer to as "a pivotal year" (K. Varnedoe (ed.), Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 30). The stylistic change of character in Twombly's Lexington pictures, so in evidence in Untitled has been remarked on by critics. Here, the agitated surface is dominated by the whiteness of the background; upon it dance restive, elusive glyphs and ciphers, which hover tantalisingly beyond the grasp of legibility or understanding. The light, bright painting appears luminous, with the forms shimmering like a mirage; because of the vast, wall-like scale of the painting it presents the viewer with a seemingly intangible vision. The deliberate restraint that Twombly has shown in Untitled and the other works from this period has been contrasted by various authors to the more populated pictures that preceded and followed these ten. Even in terms of texture, Untitled marked a turning point for Twombly, as soon after he created his pictures in Lexington, he turned towards tubes of paint rather than the house paint he favoured here that give the picture its evocative chalky appearance. It is only fitting that a work from this crucial moment in Twombly's career has had such eminent provenance, having belonged to David Whitney before being owned by Peter Brant and Charles Saatchi among others.
Two years before Twombly painted Untitled, he had made Italy his home. Italy, and Rome in particular, would continue to play a central part in Twombly's life until his death earlier this year. Twombly had been struck by the rich heritage of Italy, by the layers of history that have accreted there and the fact that everyday life continues there nonetheless. While some Italian artists in the twentieth century struggled under the burden of the legacies of their classical, medieval, and Renaissance forebears, Twombly saw a rich mine of potential in the way in which the country, so alive, was also formed and marked by the lives and events of the sometimes distant past. In Untitled and many of his other works, Twombly developed a style of mark on the picture surface that recalled the palimpsest-like accumulations of graffiti scrawled by so many on the walls and monuments of political slogans, both contemporary and some of it stretching back millennia. Abstract and gestural, the touches that have accumulated on the near-bleached surface of Untitled manage to be modern, yet are rooted in the timeless.
Having grown up in Virginia, immersed within the world of the South, with its ghostly shades and echoes of an antebellum past, Twombly was acutely aware of the poetry of memory and of history. In Rome, he found it in a condensed form and distilled it in his paintings. There, the sometimes emphatic gestural abstraction which he had explored in his earlier works and which owed much to painters he from his past such as Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, gave way to the gossamer-like scrawls of pictures such as Untitled. The looming forms inscribed in his earlier works and those of his older contemporaries were replaced by the eloquent fragility of the pencil marks that articulated the painted surfaces of his paintings. That fragility itself was emphasised by the range of effacements, which are so in evidence in Untitled and its sister-pictures. This use of white paint on the already white surface, sometimes accumulating in drips and gloopy emanations, introduces an ambiguous physicality: the luminous mirage-like composition appears to be slipping back and forth across the borders of its canvas. The combination of the use of pencil and white-on-white paint adds to the sense of intangibility and delicacy that suffuses Untitled.
These seemingly vulnerable, febrile marks convey a sense of anxiety that appears to resonate with the existentialism that had come to dominate so much of the European avant-garde in the post-war years. Like ancient graffiti, each one is a tenuous and tentative affirmation. Occasionally, some of them appear on the brink of forming coherent words or signs; yet it is their teasing abstraction that renders them all the more eloquent. Instead, they become barely corporeal records of the artist's own movements as he created them, thread-like records of their their own creation. As Twombly explained two years earlier, "Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate-- it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception" (C. Twombly, quoted in ibid., p. 27). It is in allowing our eyes to drift across this glowing manuscript of highly personalised marks that we are linked to that moment of artistic creation over five decades ago,which brought Untitled into existence.
The ineffable nature of Twombly's marks is accentuated in the Lexington pictures such as Untitled by their emphatic whiteness. While this had long been a feature in many of Twombly's works, here it reached an apogee, dominating the surface to the point that the various marks are almost subsumed within its brilliance. This is the culmination of Twombly's exploration of the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé's dialogue on whiteness. He has captured the awe of the blank page and allowed it to remain even in the picture's finished state through the figment-like shards of scribbled signs that punctuate the surface. It is perhaps ironic that Untitled and its sister-pictures, with their sparse markings, were made in Virginia, considering the fact that back in Italy, the monochrome held sway. Indeed, Piero Manzoni had begun creating his textured Achromes around the time of Twombly's successful exhibition in Milan two years earlier. As with most of Twombly's early work, a European influence, whether the "musical scores" of Mallarmé's poetry, a whiteness undergirding the poet's dispersal of words over a page or the layers of ancient and contemporary Mediterranean artistic production, Twombly's Untitled resonates with a dynamic constellation of rhythmic markings, articulating a physical response to materials, which echoes through millennia.
Two years before Twombly painted Untitled, he had made Italy his home. Italy, and Rome in particular, would continue to play a central part in Twombly's life until his death earlier this year. Twombly had been struck by the rich heritage of Italy, by the layers of history that have accreted there and the fact that everyday life continues there nonetheless. While some Italian artists in the twentieth century struggled under the burden of the legacies of their classical, medieval, and Renaissance forebears, Twombly saw a rich mine of potential in the way in which the country, so alive, was also formed and marked by the lives and events of the sometimes distant past. In Untitled and many of his other works, Twombly developed a style of mark on the picture surface that recalled the palimpsest-like accumulations of graffiti scrawled by so many on the walls and monuments of political slogans, both contemporary and some of it stretching back millennia. Abstract and gestural, the touches that have accumulated on the near-bleached surface of Untitled manage to be modern, yet are rooted in the timeless.
Having grown up in Virginia, immersed within the world of the South, with its ghostly shades and echoes of an antebellum past, Twombly was acutely aware of the poetry of memory and of history. In Rome, he found it in a condensed form and distilled it in his paintings. There, the sometimes emphatic gestural abstraction which he had explored in his earlier works and which owed much to painters he from his past such as Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, gave way to the gossamer-like scrawls of pictures such as Untitled. The looming forms inscribed in his earlier works and those of his older contemporaries were replaced by the eloquent fragility of the pencil marks that articulated the painted surfaces of his paintings. That fragility itself was emphasised by the range of effacements, which are so in evidence in Untitled and its sister-pictures. This use of white paint on the already white surface, sometimes accumulating in drips and gloopy emanations, introduces an ambiguous physicality: the luminous mirage-like composition appears to be slipping back and forth across the borders of its canvas. The combination of the use of pencil and white-on-white paint adds to the sense of intangibility and delicacy that suffuses Untitled.
These seemingly vulnerable, febrile marks convey a sense of anxiety that appears to resonate with the existentialism that had come to dominate so much of the European avant-garde in the post-war years. Like ancient graffiti, each one is a tenuous and tentative affirmation. Occasionally, some of them appear on the brink of forming coherent words or signs; yet it is their teasing abstraction that renders them all the more eloquent. Instead, they become barely corporeal records of the artist's own movements as he created them, thread-like records of their their own creation. As Twombly explained two years earlier, "Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate-- it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception" (C. Twombly, quoted in ibid., p. 27). It is in allowing our eyes to drift across this glowing manuscript of highly personalised marks that we are linked to that moment of artistic creation over five decades ago,which brought Untitled into existence.
The ineffable nature of Twombly's marks is accentuated in the Lexington pictures such as Untitled by their emphatic whiteness. While this had long been a feature in many of Twombly's works, here it reached an apogee, dominating the surface to the point that the various marks are almost subsumed within its brilliance. This is the culmination of Twombly's exploration of the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé's dialogue on whiteness. He has captured the awe of the blank page and allowed it to remain even in the picture's finished state through the figment-like shards of scribbled signs that punctuate the surface. It is perhaps ironic that Untitled and its sister-pictures, with their sparse markings, were made in Virginia, considering the fact that back in Italy, the monochrome held sway. Indeed, Piero Manzoni had begun creating his textured Achromes around the time of Twombly's successful exhibition in Milan two years earlier. As with most of Twombly's early work, a European influence, whether the "musical scores" of Mallarmé's poetry, a whiteness undergirding the poet's dispersal of words over a page or the layers of ancient and contemporary Mediterranean artistic production, Twombly's Untitled resonates with a dynamic constellation of rhythmic markings, articulating a physical response to materials, which echoes through millennia.