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Lot Essay
‘Every little point sets up a tension with something else. Each mark or shape is in a natural position. I mean, I don’t see anything that looks arbitrary or self-consciously placed. To me, it looks as if it happened naturally, and that’s the point I strive for’
–Cy Twombly
Between 1966 and 1971, Cy Twombly created a startling series of sober, analytical works executed on black or grey grounds that are collectively often called the ‘blackboard’ paintings. These powerful, minimalistic and strongly linear works were ones that marked a dramatic departure in Twombly’s work from the loose, gestural scrawl and baroque painterly exuberance of his earlier style in favour of a more clinical examination of the graphic quality of line as a transmitter of meaning. Today, it is these works that are widely regarded as being among the artist’s most important as well as best-known and most popular pictures.
Executed in Rome, in June 1971, Untitled (Ramifications) is one of the last of this cycle of ‘blackboard’-style pictures. It is one of a series of nine works made in the summer of 1971 that were subsequently shown together at a solo exhibition under the title Ramifications held at Lucio Amelio’s Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1972.
Deriving from the French word ‘ramifier’, meaning to branch out or to form branches, the word ‘ramification’ refers to the branching effects of an earlier action. And, as this title suggests, this is precisely what the vertical sequence of horizontal lines, letters, numbers and other, often unintelligible, fragments of handwriting appears to convey in the nine pictures Twombly presented as ‘Ramifications’ in Naples in 1972. Comprising, in the main, of a repeated vertical sequence of horizontal lines and notations that collectively build into the format of a handwritten letter, these works, appear, in part, to present a sequence of extended fragments, consequences or developments from some of Twombly’s most epic and expansive graphic experiments of the period. In particular pictures such as his two, vast, Treatise on the Veil paintings and some of the more simple examples from his Bolsena series where, through a combination of ruled lines and graphic notation, Twombly had explored the nuances of line, measurement and numerical calculation as carriers and conveyers of information, language and meaning.
Where, in the past, Twombly had graphically explored the pictorial landscape of Mediterranean history, myth, sex and violence, now, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, he was analyzing and exploring a new conceptual landscape of measurement, calculation, mathematics, geometry and scientific notation. In part, this development in Twombly’s work can be seen as a reflection of the then prevailing Minimalist and Conceptualist concern with the fundamentals of form that dominated so much of the American and European avant-garde at this time. The strict limitations that Twombly imposed upon himself during this period are wholly in tune with such concerns. The reduction of his palette to an austere monochrome and his regimented use of linear repetition and simple permutation as means of turning the singular into the plural, line into field, and graphic linearity into pictorial poetry, are all elements of Twombly’s work from this period that find visual echoes in the experiments and approach of contemporaries like Eva Hesse, Sol Le Witt, Brice Marden or Richard Serra.
Untitled (Ramifications) is no exception in this respect. As in all of the pictures in the ‘Ramifications’ series, it comprises of a sequence of regimented and repeated horizontal lines drawn in pencil and blue wax crayon across the misty background of a large sheet of paper covered with a wash of grey oil paint. Collectively, these sequential lines and fragments of lines build into a format suggestive of a handwritten letter, an annotated musical score or a graph outlining the path of waves on the sea. Here, line and notation become graphic passages of time, interspersed with spatial pauses, gaps, and breaks. But, collectively, each mark also builds into a coherent pictorial rhythm that reads like a graphic form of poetry and creates an entire landscape. In all these respects, Untitled (Ramifications) is reminiscent of the great series of graphic letter-like paintings that Twombly had made in Sperlonga in 1959: the Poems to the Sea.
Executed in 1971, towards the end of another great cycle of creativity in Twombly’s work, it is as if, in the ‘Ramifications’, the artist had come full circle and once again been led back to the sea; to the great vista of the Mediterranean that was perennially to inform and dominate so much of his rich and varied oeuvre throughout the rest of his career.
–Cy Twombly
Between 1966 and 1971, Cy Twombly created a startling series of sober, analytical works executed on black or grey grounds that are collectively often called the ‘blackboard’ paintings. These powerful, minimalistic and strongly linear works were ones that marked a dramatic departure in Twombly’s work from the loose, gestural scrawl and baroque painterly exuberance of his earlier style in favour of a more clinical examination of the graphic quality of line as a transmitter of meaning. Today, it is these works that are widely regarded as being among the artist’s most important as well as best-known and most popular pictures.
Executed in Rome, in June 1971, Untitled (Ramifications) is one of the last of this cycle of ‘blackboard’-style pictures. It is one of a series of nine works made in the summer of 1971 that were subsequently shown together at a solo exhibition under the title Ramifications held at Lucio Amelio’s Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1972.
Deriving from the French word ‘ramifier’, meaning to branch out or to form branches, the word ‘ramification’ refers to the branching effects of an earlier action. And, as this title suggests, this is precisely what the vertical sequence of horizontal lines, letters, numbers and other, often unintelligible, fragments of handwriting appears to convey in the nine pictures Twombly presented as ‘Ramifications’ in Naples in 1972. Comprising, in the main, of a repeated vertical sequence of horizontal lines and notations that collectively build into the format of a handwritten letter, these works, appear, in part, to present a sequence of extended fragments, consequences or developments from some of Twombly’s most epic and expansive graphic experiments of the period. In particular pictures such as his two, vast, Treatise on the Veil paintings and some of the more simple examples from his Bolsena series where, through a combination of ruled lines and graphic notation, Twombly had explored the nuances of line, measurement and numerical calculation as carriers and conveyers of information, language and meaning.
Where, in the past, Twombly had graphically explored the pictorial landscape of Mediterranean history, myth, sex and violence, now, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, he was analyzing and exploring a new conceptual landscape of measurement, calculation, mathematics, geometry and scientific notation. In part, this development in Twombly’s work can be seen as a reflection of the then prevailing Minimalist and Conceptualist concern with the fundamentals of form that dominated so much of the American and European avant-garde at this time. The strict limitations that Twombly imposed upon himself during this period are wholly in tune with such concerns. The reduction of his palette to an austere monochrome and his regimented use of linear repetition and simple permutation as means of turning the singular into the plural, line into field, and graphic linearity into pictorial poetry, are all elements of Twombly’s work from this period that find visual echoes in the experiments and approach of contemporaries like Eva Hesse, Sol Le Witt, Brice Marden or Richard Serra.
Untitled (Ramifications) is no exception in this respect. As in all of the pictures in the ‘Ramifications’ series, it comprises of a sequence of regimented and repeated horizontal lines drawn in pencil and blue wax crayon across the misty background of a large sheet of paper covered with a wash of grey oil paint. Collectively, these sequential lines and fragments of lines build into a format suggestive of a handwritten letter, an annotated musical score or a graph outlining the path of waves on the sea. Here, line and notation become graphic passages of time, interspersed with spatial pauses, gaps, and breaks. But, collectively, each mark also builds into a coherent pictorial rhythm that reads like a graphic form of poetry and creates an entire landscape. In all these respects, Untitled (Ramifications) is reminiscent of the great series of graphic letter-like paintings that Twombly had made in Sperlonga in 1959: the Poems to the Sea.
Executed in 1971, towards the end of another great cycle of creativity in Twombly’s work, it is as if, in the ‘Ramifications’, the artist had come full circle and once again been led back to the sea; to the great vista of the Mediterranean that was perennially to inform and dominate so much of his rich and varied oeuvre throughout the rest of his career.