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Lot Essay
Cy Twombly’s portraits of George and Ann D’Almeida belong to a rare group of six surviving portrait paintings of close friends and supporters of his work that the artist made in 1967 at the height of a major turning point in his career. Along with the English-born painter George D’Almeida and his wife Ann, this interesting group of six paintings also includes portraits of Giorgio Franchetti (Twombly’s brother-in-law and patron of the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome) and his wife Ann; a portrait of Paul Getty, friend of George D’Almeida, and a single portrait of Count Alvise di Robilant. Robilant was the husband of Twombly’s old friend from Virginia, Betty Stokes. A cultured patron of the arts, he was the man who had first introduced Twombly to Giorgio Franchetti and Franchetti’s sister Tatiana whom Twombly had married in 1959.
This select and refined group of portraits of some of his closest friends was executed at an important time for Twombly when his art was undergoing a dramatic transformation. In 1966 Twombly had embarked on what was to become a highly celebrated series of works now sometimes known as the ‘blackboard’ paintings. Distinguishable for their strict graphic regularity, severe formal restraint and often apparent emptiness, these Minimalist-looking paintings marked a significant departure from the more schismatic, densely worked and spontaneous lyrical scrawls of the artist’s earlier Roman paintings. Inspired by the notion of the classroom blackboard or the child’s primer as a temporal and highly graphic conveyor of information, these new works were also predominantly painted on dark grey backgrounds that resembled the slate of a blackboard.
Twombly’s portraits of George D’Almeida and his wife Ann whom Twombly had befriended while living in Rome, form part of a rare group of white-ground pictures that also derive from this important period when – perhaps inspired by Minimalism – the artist was attempting to pare everything down to its graphic essentials.
Together with the four other surviving portrait paintings of his friends made in 1967, these works do not, in the manner of traditional portraiture, provide a representation of the appearance of their subject. Rather, set within the mysterious Mallarméan white ground of Twombly’s earlier Roman paintings, these works attempt to convey a unique graphic sense of their subject’s presence and how it affected and impressed itself upon the artist. These are portraits of how the sitter – in each case a close friend of the artist – is perceived and experienced mentally, emotionally and physically by Twombly, not of their exterior visual appearance. All these various impressions have been recorded by Twombly impulsively, spontaneously, and almost seismographically with the artist’s characteristically loose, fluid, sensitive, and all-too-capable graphic touch. Engrained into the multiple-layered white-painted surface of the canvas, part palimpsest, part graffiti-like drawing, part sculptural incision, these works transcend the traditional medium of painting as much as they do that of conventional portraiture.
As in many of Twombly’s works, his subject’s titles are also inscribed in a loose, seemingly faded or even overpainted script that, emphasizing the codified graphic nature of writing, also offers a literary echo to the reductive nature of his scrawled pictorial short-hand. This unique, short-hand and highly graphic style of painting (using both a pencil and a conté crayon engrained in and amidst multiple layers of white paint) and spontaneously articulating simple, often archetypal forms, symbols, and habitualized scribbles, derives predominantly form a prolonged and conscious study of simple, primitive and archetypal forms and marks that Twombly had made on his travels through North Africa and after visits to ethnographic collections on his first trip to Rome in 1953. Indeed, in this respect, the strongly vertical form of Twombly’s portrait of George D’Almeida coupled with the wide triangular-like form of Ann are motifs of a kind that recur often throughout Twombly’s career, especially in his sculpture, and in particular are echoed by the two dominant forms first given prominence in his art in the important early Morocco-inspired painting entitled Tiznit now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This select and refined group of portraits of some of his closest friends was executed at an important time for Twombly when his art was undergoing a dramatic transformation. In 1966 Twombly had embarked on what was to become a highly celebrated series of works now sometimes known as the ‘blackboard’ paintings. Distinguishable for their strict graphic regularity, severe formal restraint and often apparent emptiness, these Minimalist-looking paintings marked a significant departure from the more schismatic, densely worked and spontaneous lyrical scrawls of the artist’s earlier Roman paintings. Inspired by the notion of the classroom blackboard or the child’s primer as a temporal and highly graphic conveyor of information, these new works were also predominantly painted on dark grey backgrounds that resembled the slate of a blackboard.
Twombly’s portraits of George D’Almeida and his wife Ann whom Twombly had befriended while living in Rome, form part of a rare group of white-ground pictures that also derive from this important period when – perhaps inspired by Minimalism – the artist was attempting to pare everything down to its graphic essentials.
Together with the four other surviving portrait paintings of his friends made in 1967, these works do not, in the manner of traditional portraiture, provide a representation of the appearance of their subject. Rather, set within the mysterious Mallarméan white ground of Twombly’s earlier Roman paintings, these works attempt to convey a unique graphic sense of their subject’s presence and how it affected and impressed itself upon the artist. These are portraits of how the sitter – in each case a close friend of the artist – is perceived and experienced mentally, emotionally and physically by Twombly, not of their exterior visual appearance. All these various impressions have been recorded by Twombly impulsively, spontaneously, and almost seismographically with the artist’s characteristically loose, fluid, sensitive, and all-too-capable graphic touch. Engrained into the multiple-layered white-painted surface of the canvas, part palimpsest, part graffiti-like drawing, part sculptural incision, these works transcend the traditional medium of painting as much as they do that of conventional portraiture.
As in many of Twombly’s works, his subject’s titles are also inscribed in a loose, seemingly faded or even overpainted script that, emphasizing the codified graphic nature of writing, also offers a literary echo to the reductive nature of his scrawled pictorial short-hand. This unique, short-hand and highly graphic style of painting (using both a pencil and a conté crayon engrained in and amidst multiple layers of white paint) and spontaneously articulating simple, often archetypal forms, symbols, and habitualized scribbles, derives predominantly form a prolonged and conscious study of simple, primitive and archetypal forms and marks that Twombly had made on his travels through North Africa and after visits to ethnographic collections on his first trip to Rome in 1953. Indeed, in this respect, the strongly vertical form of Twombly’s portrait of George D’Almeida coupled with the wide triangular-like form of Ann are motifs of a kind that recur often throughout Twombly’s career, especially in his sculpture, and in particular are echoed by the two dominant forms first given prominence in his art in the important early Morocco-inspired painting entitled Tiznit now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.