.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The four seasons, a classic and ancient theme in literature, music, and art was a subject Twombly addressed throughout his career. Twombl addressed the winter season in a series of ten paintings known as Untitled (Winter Pictures), painted in Gaeta over the course of six to eight months in the winter of 2003 and 2004.
Gaeta is an observatory for the passing seasons, from the long vertical windows in his studio, Twombly could observe the sea an the intense light in Gaeta, and the landforms on the promontory. As early as 1959, Twombly was considering the sea and its natural forces as a subject in a work titled Poems to the Sea. Roland Barthes elegantly described these paintings as the "whole life of forms, colors, and light which occurs at the frontier of the terrestrial landscape an the plains of the sea" (quoted in Cy Twombly, Paintings and Drawings, 1954-1957, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1979, p. 16). Twombly observed "If you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white-early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean at least is always just white, white white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a whiter light. Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I'm always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it" (C. Twombly, Interview with David Sylvester (June 2000), in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, New York and London, 19, 2001, p. 175).
Untitled No. 3, 2004 confirms Twombly's earliest preoccupations. First, the rows of rivulets call to mind the consecutive verticals of his 1950 works both laid out on canvas (Solon I, 1952 and Quarzeat, 1953) as well as in the painted wood and constructed sculpture that Twombly produced throughout his career. The fluent spontaneity of paint handling in Untitled No. 3, 2004 is shared by a number of works, such as the Ferragosto painting and Leda and the Swan, both from 1963. Finally, the rain of dripped color is echoed in his later works, among them the exultant intoxications on the Roman god, Bacchus, 2005. Like the Bacchus paintings, then, standing rows and painterly outbursts characterize the present work, which is punctuated by twisting ribbons of raw umber, brown, red oxide, and ivory black chroma caught in dynamic fluctuations by the overlay of white pigment that the artist also used in his sculptures to bring unity to disparate forms and surfaces.
Untitled No.3, 2004 marks out Twombly's mirroring trajectory of his own work and his complex relationship to the more recent history of painting. From his early fascination with Arshile Gorky to his later mentorship with Robert Motherwell and friendship with Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly reenacts these influences in his drips and organic forms. Down the fully eight-foot drop of the present work, skeins of white interlace with earth tones summon even Pollock's white paintings of the 1950s (White Light, 1954) to mind.
Untitled No. 3, 2004 bears witness to the sheer delight and strong commitment to the mark itself, leaving on its scumbled surface the traces of the artist's actions; dripping, coloring, and manipulating paint with a brush: "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 K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 27). As Brice Marden commented on Twombly's work- "I like that [Twombly] ends up making these paintings that are not just the result of the process of their making: the actual experience is always there" (B. Marden, Interview with K. Varnedoe, in "Cy Twombly: An Artist's Artist," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 28 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 167).
It is in the experience of looking at the white veils of Untitled No. 3, 2004 that one senses the spaces of Gaeta. The skeins of calligraphy-the graphemes of Twombly's oeuvre-here become fused with the history of the Eastern calligraphic mark. Twombly himself described canvases such as Untitled No.3, 2004 "landscape[s] of my actions" (C. Twombly, in Varnedoe, op. cit., 27), and so it is here that the luminescent events of the present work tell of "[Twombly's] psychic activity [in which] every line is an expression of deeply felt emotion or inner experience" (H. Bastian, Cy Twombly: Paintings 1952-1976, Vol. I, Berlin, 1978, p. 48).
Gaeta is an observatory for the passing seasons, from the long vertical windows in his studio, Twombly could observe the sea an the intense light in Gaeta, and the landforms on the promontory. As early as 1959, Twombly was considering the sea and its natural forces as a subject in a work titled Poems to the Sea. Roland Barthes elegantly described these paintings as the "whole life of forms, colors, and light which occurs at the frontier of the terrestrial landscape an the plains of the sea" (quoted in Cy Twombly, Paintings and Drawings, 1954-1957, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1979, p. 16). Twombly observed "If you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white-early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean at least is always just white, white white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a whiter light. Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I'm always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it" (C. Twombly, Interview with David Sylvester (June 2000), in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, New York and London, 19, 2001, p. 175).
Untitled No. 3, 2004 confirms Twombly's earliest preoccupations. First, the rows of rivulets call to mind the consecutive verticals of his 1950 works both laid out on canvas (Solon I, 1952 and Quarzeat, 1953) as well as in the painted wood and constructed sculpture that Twombly produced throughout his career. The fluent spontaneity of paint handling in Untitled No. 3, 2004 is shared by a number of works, such as the Ferragosto painting and Leda and the Swan, both from 1963. Finally, the rain of dripped color is echoed in his later works, among them the exultant intoxications on the Roman god, Bacchus, 2005. Like the Bacchus paintings, then, standing rows and painterly outbursts characterize the present work, which is punctuated by twisting ribbons of raw umber, brown, red oxide, and ivory black chroma caught in dynamic fluctuations by the overlay of white pigment that the artist also used in his sculptures to bring unity to disparate forms and surfaces.
Untitled No.3, 2004 marks out Twombly's mirroring trajectory of his own work and his complex relationship to the more recent history of painting. From his early fascination with Arshile Gorky to his later mentorship with Robert Motherwell and friendship with Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly reenacts these influences in his drips and organic forms. Down the fully eight-foot drop of the present work, skeins of white interlace with earth tones summon even Pollock's white paintings of the 1950s (White Light, 1954) to mind.
Untitled No. 3, 2004 bears witness to the sheer delight and strong commitment to the mark itself, leaving on its scumbled surface the traces of the artist's actions; dripping, coloring, and manipulating paint with a brush: "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 K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 27). As Brice Marden commented on Twombly's work- "I like that [Twombly] ends up making these paintings that are not just the result of the process of their making: the actual experience is always there" (B. Marden, Interview with K. Varnedoe, in "Cy Twombly: An Artist's Artist," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 28 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 167).
It is in the experience of looking at the white veils of Untitled No. 3, 2004 that one senses the spaces of Gaeta. The skeins of calligraphy-the graphemes of Twombly's oeuvre-here become fused with the history of the Eastern calligraphic mark. Twombly himself described canvases such as Untitled No.3, 2004 "landscape[s] of my actions" (C. Twombly, in Varnedoe, op. cit., 27), and so it is here that the luminescent events of the present work tell of "[Twombly's] psychic activity [in which] every line is an expression of deeply felt emotion or inner experience" (H. Bastian, Cy Twombly: Paintings 1952-1976, Vol. I, Berlin, 1978, p. 48).