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Lot Essay
‘This green is not simply the memory of the Abruzzo forest; for Twombly, in the bareness of his Roman studio, it intended to evoke what the desert brings about in us as an image, feeling or desire, something between the phenomena of remanence and mirage’
–Yvon Lambert
‘It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning’
–Cy Twombly
With its schismatic tracery of spectral green lines, On Returning from Tonnicoda belongs to a distinctive suite of eight works on paper that Cy Twombly completed in August 1973. Upon a blank ground, tinged with verdant light and shade, a tangle of oil and wax crayon marks dissolves into hazy sfumato layers. The work’s title relates to the artist’s sojourn in Tonnicoda that May: a small village in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, surrounded by a vast forest of oak and chestnut trees. The setting made a powerful impression on Twombly, initially inspiring the six-part cycle of drawings Turn and Coda – a characteristic play-on-words. Whilst these works channelled his immediate response to the forest, the present series – completed three months later in Rome – sought to distil its lingering visual residue. The strong linear arcs of Turn and Coda disintegrate here into a knotted web of lines, recalling the impulsive graphic handwriting of both the 1960s ‘blackboard’ works and Nini’s Paintings of 1971. Deep botanical green saturates the picture plane – a chromatic afterglow that defines several drawing cycles from this month, notably Green Duration and Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of his Bees. ‘This green is not simply the memory of the Abruzzo forest’, writes Yvon Lambert; ‘for Twombly, in the bareness of his Roman studio, it intended to evoke what the desert brings about in us as an image, feeling or desire, something between the phenomena of remanence and mirage’ (Y. Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier, Volume VI, Rome 1979, p. 68). Part of the same family collection since its creation, the work is inscribed on the reverse with a dedication to Giorgio Franchetti: an important early patron who would later become Twombly’s brother-in-law.
Following on from the major paintings of the 1960s, the early 1970s witnessed an intensive focus on drawing and works on paper within Twombly’s oeuvre. Scholarship on the artist, too, began to shift its attention towards these media: 1973 saw both the Kunstmuseum Basel’s major retrospective of his drawings, and the publication of the first volume of the drawings catalogue raisonné by Heiner Bastian. For Twombly, the primal, semi-automatic act of making marks on paper lay at the heart of his aesthetic. Whilst working as a cryptologist in the US military during the 1950s, he had spent many hours drawing in the dark, seeking to disconnect his hand from the visual impulses of his eye. ‘It’s like a nervous system’, he would later explain. ‘It’s not described, it’s happening … The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning’ (C. Twombly, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 179). For Roland Barthes, writing on the Twenty-four Short Pieces created alongside the Tonnicoda drawings, this approach inverts traditional figure-ground relationships: the line, with its near-electric charge, almost becomes the support for the paper. ‘There is a silence, or, to be more precise, a fine and tenuous crackle of the page, but this background is a positive force in its own right’, he explains. ‘By reversing the usual relationships to be found in a classical drawing, one could say that it’s the line, the grating, the form, in short the graphic event, that allows the sheet of paper to exist, to signify, to play’ (R. Barthes, ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’, 1976, reproduced in N. del Roscio (ed.), Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich 2002, p. 101).
Following his move to Rome in the late 1950s, Twombly’s nascent language of mark-making had originally drawn much inspiration from the ancient graffiti that lined the city streets. Throughout his career, however, he was deeply inspired by the natural world. ‘That’s my first love, landscape’, he later explained. ‘You can’t be a poet without knowing any botany or plants … it’s impossible, that’s the first thing you should know’ (C. Twombly, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 173). In the 1970s, Twombly began to spend increasing amounts of time in the Italian countryside, partly due to ongoing renovations at his house in Bassano in Terevina. In the works on paper produced during this period, writes Simon Schama, ‘the tension between linearity and ebullient organicism stays unresolved’ (S. Schama, ‘Cy Twombly’, in N. del Roscio (ed.), The Essential Cy Twombly, London 2014, pp. 12-13). Whilst certain works in the Twenty-four Short Pieces, for example, are almost Minimalist in their juxtaposition of line and space, others erupt into biological chaos: looping spirals and webs, etched into the surface of the paper like fossils. In On Returning from Tonnicoda, the latter tendency is brought to bear upon a work that seeks to transcribe the sensory imprint of nature upon the psyche. In the undulating trace of Twombly’s green line, the memory flickers in and out of shadow, flaring and fading within the mind’s eye.
–Yvon Lambert
‘It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning’
–Cy Twombly
With its schismatic tracery of spectral green lines, On Returning from Tonnicoda belongs to a distinctive suite of eight works on paper that Cy Twombly completed in August 1973. Upon a blank ground, tinged with verdant light and shade, a tangle of oil and wax crayon marks dissolves into hazy sfumato layers. The work’s title relates to the artist’s sojourn in Tonnicoda that May: a small village in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, surrounded by a vast forest of oak and chestnut trees. The setting made a powerful impression on Twombly, initially inspiring the six-part cycle of drawings Turn and Coda – a characteristic play-on-words. Whilst these works channelled his immediate response to the forest, the present series – completed three months later in Rome – sought to distil its lingering visual residue. The strong linear arcs of Turn and Coda disintegrate here into a knotted web of lines, recalling the impulsive graphic handwriting of both the 1960s ‘blackboard’ works and Nini’s Paintings of 1971. Deep botanical green saturates the picture plane – a chromatic afterglow that defines several drawing cycles from this month, notably Green Duration and Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of his Bees. ‘This green is not simply the memory of the Abruzzo forest’, writes Yvon Lambert; ‘for Twombly, in the bareness of his Roman studio, it intended to evoke what the desert brings about in us as an image, feeling or desire, something between the phenomena of remanence and mirage’ (Y. Lambert, Cy Twombly: Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier, Volume VI, Rome 1979, p. 68). Part of the same family collection since its creation, the work is inscribed on the reverse with a dedication to Giorgio Franchetti: an important early patron who would later become Twombly’s brother-in-law.
Following on from the major paintings of the 1960s, the early 1970s witnessed an intensive focus on drawing and works on paper within Twombly’s oeuvre. Scholarship on the artist, too, began to shift its attention towards these media: 1973 saw both the Kunstmuseum Basel’s major retrospective of his drawings, and the publication of the first volume of the drawings catalogue raisonné by Heiner Bastian. For Twombly, the primal, semi-automatic act of making marks on paper lay at the heart of his aesthetic. Whilst working as a cryptologist in the US military during the 1950s, he had spent many hours drawing in the dark, seeking to disconnect his hand from the visual impulses of his eye. ‘It’s like a nervous system’, he would later explain. ‘It’s not described, it’s happening … The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning’ (C. Twombly, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 179). For Roland Barthes, writing on the Twenty-four Short Pieces created alongside the Tonnicoda drawings, this approach inverts traditional figure-ground relationships: the line, with its near-electric charge, almost becomes the support for the paper. ‘There is a silence, or, to be more precise, a fine and tenuous crackle of the page, but this background is a positive force in its own right’, he explains. ‘By reversing the usual relationships to be found in a classical drawing, one could say that it’s the line, the grating, the form, in short the graphic event, that allows the sheet of paper to exist, to signify, to play’ (R. Barthes, ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’, 1976, reproduced in N. del Roscio (ed.), Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich 2002, p. 101).
Following his move to Rome in the late 1950s, Twombly’s nascent language of mark-making had originally drawn much inspiration from the ancient graffiti that lined the city streets. Throughout his career, however, he was deeply inspired by the natural world. ‘That’s my first love, landscape’, he later explained. ‘You can’t be a poet without knowing any botany or plants … it’s impossible, that’s the first thing you should know’ (C. Twombly, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 173). In the 1970s, Twombly began to spend increasing amounts of time in the Italian countryside, partly due to ongoing renovations at his house in Bassano in Terevina. In the works on paper produced during this period, writes Simon Schama, ‘the tension between linearity and ebullient organicism stays unresolved’ (S. Schama, ‘Cy Twombly’, in N. del Roscio (ed.), The Essential Cy Twombly, London 2014, pp. 12-13). Whilst certain works in the Twenty-four Short Pieces, for example, are almost Minimalist in their juxtaposition of line and space, others erupt into biological chaos: looping spirals and webs, etched into the surface of the paper like fossils. In On Returning from Tonnicoda, the latter tendency is brought to bear upon a work that seeks to transcribe the sensory imprint of nature upon the psyche. In the undulating trace of Twombly’s green line, the memory flickers in and out of shadow, flaring and fading within the mind’s eye.