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Lot Essay
‘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.’ – Roland Barthes
An ebullient and pictorial cloud-like swirl of grey, wispy pink and red lines fizz against creamy white paper in Cy Twombly’s Untitled. Created in 1962, now-familiar tropes fill the page: crimson nubs, playfully eroticized biomorphic forms, rowdy loops, ragged, unruly lines, and, in the centre, two rounded shapes, merged at an eddy of black pencil. By this juncture, Twombly had expanded his graphic lexicon, which critic Roberta Smith referred to as his ‘progressive discovery of the communicative powers of the mark, as gesture, assign, as material, as image’ (R. Smith, ‘Rewriting History’, Cy Twombly, New York, 1986, n. p.) Doing so allowed for a more elastic interpretation, and the lobed forms have variously been described as hearts, breasts that were also buttocks, orifices, and symbols of infinity, depending on their incarnation. The 1960s were a decade of abundant energy and prolific output for Twombly, coinciding with his move to Rome in 1957; by 1962, he was permanently settled in the city and was renting a studio in Piazza del Biscione near Campo de’ Fiori. This marks the beginnings of a ‘transgressive Twombly’, both for his suggestive content as well as the savagery of his mark making which would continue throughout his career (R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 266). Indeed, in these wax pencil drawings from the early 1960s, there is a sense of complete submission to the line, and they foreshadow elements of Twombly’s developing practice, particularly the collapse of image, script, and language through his loose and gestural scrawls. Indeed, the beginning of an ecstatic tempo is evident in Untitled’s exuberant streaks and dense vortexes of red, the hum of activity that emanates from the intoxicatingly enigmatic landscape of lines.
An ebullient and pictorial cloud-like swirl of grey, wispy pink and red lines fizz against creamy white paper in Cy Twombly’s Untitled. Created in 1962, now-familiar tropes fill the page: crimson nubs, playfully eroticized biomorphic forms, rowdy loops, ragged, unruly lines, and, in the centre, two rounded shapes, merged at an eddy of black pencil. By this juncture, Twombly had expanded his graphic lexicon, which critic Roberta Smith referred to as his ‘progressive discovery of the communicative powers of the mark, as gesture, assign, as material, as image’ (R. Smith, ‘Rewriting History’, Cy Twombly, New York, 1986, n. p.) Doing so allowed for a more elastic interpretation, and the lobed forms have variously been described as hearts, breasts that were also buttocks, orifices, and symbols of infinity, depending on their incarnation. The 1960s were a decade of abundant energy and prolific output for Twombly, coinciding with his move to Rome in 1957; by 1962, he was permanently settled in the city and was renting a studio in Piazza del Biscione near Campo de’ Fiori. This marks the beginnings of a ‘transgressive Twombly’, both for his suggestive content as well as the savagery of his mark making which would continue throughout his career (R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 266). Indeed, in these wax pencil drawings from the early 1960s, there is a sense of complete submission to the line, and they foreshadow elements of Twombly’s developing practice, particularly the collapse of image, script, and language through his loose and gestural scrawls. Indeed, the beginning of an ecstatic tempo is evident in Untitled’s exuberant streaks and dense vortexes of red, the hum of activity that emanates from the intoxicatingly enigmatic landscape of lines.