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Lot Essay
Infused with the lyrical scribbles for which he is best known, Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Roman Note) is a rich and evocative work from a seminal moment in the artist’s career, as it was painted concurrently to his celebrated Blackboard paintings of 1966-1971. Dashed across the page with an energy and spirit known only to this series, these rich, enigmatic marks—rendered in pale blue and dark gray crayon—linger like a palimpsest inscribed upon some ancient stone tablet. Twombly has applied several translucent layers of thinned-down oil paint to create a kind of pearlescent scrim, upon which these blue notations move freely across the sheet, emanating a kind of rhythmic pulse. Both primal and cerebral, the work is a testament to the legacy of the artist’s mark, whilst evoking deeper connections to the history, mythology and emotion of the Classical past, and Twombly’s spiritual relationship with Rome, the Eternal City.
Sweeping across the page in five concurrent bands of lyrical blue script, Twombly’s drawing evokes the impassioned, feverish scrawl of a love letter, dashed off in secrecy or haste. Resembling handwriting but remaining undeniably illegible, these scribblings break free from rational thought in order to become graphic signifiers of something deeper and more powerful. In Untitled (Roman Note) Twombly delineates two separate layers of handwriting—one rendered in a pale blue crayon and the other in a darker gray that mimics the color of graphite. These notations seem to rise upward from the sheet itself, as the waxy crayon Twombly selected glides atop the painted layer beneath. To begin, Twombly has brushed on a few layers of translucent white oil paint over the sheet, leaving small areas of the bare page visible. This creates a shimmering, luminous field upon which the blue scribbles seem to hover and dance. The two lines of text echo each other, almost as if one had been reflected in water or a mirror and bounced back again. The pale blue seems to have been applied first—although It is often difficult to determine where one line begins and another ends.
From his first visit to Rome in the early 1950s, Twombly was immediately taken with its history and ambience. He found inspiration in the Classical ruins that he saw around him, and became particularly fascinated with the ancient graffiti that was scratched onto the surface of its ancient ruins. This early influence would prove to be a transformative one, allowing the artist to maintain ties with a Classical past whilst simultaneously making a clean break from it. The handwritten marks that would find their way into his paintings ultimately shake off their connection to graffiti and handwriting, however, splintering off into something entirely new and revolutionary. Despite their ties to a Classical past, however, Twombly’s Blackboard paintings were also inspired by the future, especially the bold, new utopian era promised by the Space Age. The Apollo moon landings of the previous summer, in July 1969, greatly interested him, especially the sophisticated mathematical calculations required to send the spacecraft into orbit and bring it safely back down to Earth. Twombly began to work these cryptic mathematical notations into his paintings, especially the series of fourteen large-scale works known as the Bolsena paintings. Twombly created them concurrently to the moon landing, made during the summer of 1969 whilst working in seclusion in a decaying Italian palazzo about an hour outside of Rome.
In many ways, Twombly’s paintings emanate from a purely automatic impulse, detached as they are from rational thought and coming instead from deeper inside the subconscious mind. They are not, however, purely unconscious “doodles,” but they do share certain affinities with the kind of “pure psychic automatism,” that Andé Breton described in defining the terms of Surrealism. Twombly had actually experimented with a kind of automatic writing during his military service in the 1950s. He would often write and draw in the dark as a way to “untrain” his hand. However, as the artist and curator Tacita Dean has pointed out, “It is wrong to relate Twombly’s marks to doodling; they come from mindfulness rather than mindlessness and are not the marks of an unconscious mind but of a knowing one. At no point has he relinquished his aesthetic control, but instead he is working from the enviable state of just below his deliberate mind, where he is no longer self-conscious or pre-imaginative. It is enviable because it is not so easy to achieve...” (T. Dean, "A Panegyric" in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 38).
This mysterious cerebral state, described as “just below the deliberate mind,” undoubtedly emanates from a place where the mind of the artist unwinds and allows the hand to do its work. It comes close to what has been described as “flow state” by athletes, artists and musicians who surrender their mind and body to a kind of zen-like focus and concentration, losing all track of time and even numbed to the sensory experiences of the body. Twombly’s paintings are the lingering relics of this state, as they abandon the safety of known language and recognizable symbols and instead revert to a kind of primal urge. In Untitled (Roman Note), Twombly’s lines speak to this almost naive yet powerful artistic impulse. They travel across space and time—emanating a kind of primal, rhythmic pulse.
Twombly’s work, then, courts legibility and illegibility in equal parts, as his notations depart the legible field of either writing or drawing and instead move into another realm entirely. “Twombly's hard-to-read hand invites the viewer (sometimes tantalizingly) to decipher the meaning of his script. But deciphering is not quite right,” the British scholar Mary Jacobus has written. “The effect...is like that of a musical score. ... Twombly's composition becomes a kind of ‘open form,’ inviting the viewer to participate in a temporal experience like that of modern music" (M. Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, Princeton, 2016, p. 51).
“... Twombly's composition becomes a kind of ‘open form,’ inviting the viewer to participate in a temporal experience like that of modern music.”(M. Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, Princeton, 2016, p. 51)
Music is perhaps a fitting metaphor in describing Twombly’s Untitled (Roman Note), as it was acquired in 1995by the legendary rock guitarist Eric Clapton, where it has been treasured for over a quarter of a century. One of the greatest living artists of all time, Clapton is also one of the world’s most accomplished art collectors, having amassed, over the years, an extensive collection of works by Gerhard Richter, Henri Matisse, and, in the present work, Twombly.
Sweeping across the page in five concurrent bands of lyrical blue script, Twombly’s drawing evokes the impassioned, feverish scrawl of a love letter, dashed off in secrecy or haste. Resembling handwriting but remaining undeniably illegible, these scribblings break free from rational thought in order to become graphic signifiers of something deeper and more powerful. In Untitled (Roman Note) Twombly delineates two separate layers of handwriting—one rendered in a pale blue crayon and the other in a darker gray that mimics the color of graphite. These notations seem to rise upward from the sheet itself, as the waxy crayon Twombly selected glides atop the painted layer beneath. To begin, Twombly has brushed on a few layers of translucent white oil paint over the sheet, leaving small areas of the bare page visible. This creates a shimmering, luminous field upon which the blue scribbles seem to hover and dance. The two lines of text echo each other, almost as if one had been reflected in water or a mirror and bounced back again. The pale blue seems to have been applied first—although It is often difficult to determine where one line begins and another ends.
From his first visit to Rome in the early 1950s, Twombly was immediately taken with its history and ambience. He found inspiration in the Classical ruins that he saw around him, and became particularly fascinated with the ancient graffiti that was scratched onto the surface of its ancient ruins. This early influence would prove to be a transformative one, allowing the artist to maintain ties with a Classical past whilst simultaneously making a clean break from it. The handwritten marks that would find their way into his paintings ultimately shake off their connection to graffiti and handwriting, however, splintering off into something entirely new and revolutionary. Despite their ties to a Classical past, however, Twombly’s Blackboard paintings were also inspired by the future, especially the bold, new utopian era promised by the Space Age. The Apollo moon landings of the previous summer, in July 1969, greatly interested him, especially the sophisticated mathematical calculations required to send the spacecraft into orbit and bring it safely back down to Earth. Twombly began to work these cryptic mathematical notations into his paintings, especially the series of fourteen large-scale works known as the Bolsena paintings. Twombly created them concurrently to the moon landing, made during the summer of 1969 whilst working in seclusion in a decaying Italian palazzo about an hour outside of Rome.
In many ways, Twombly’s paintings emanate from a purely automatic impulse, detached as they are from rational thought and coming instead from deeper inside the subconscious mind. They are not, however, purely unconscious “doodles,” but they do share certain affinities with the kind of “pure psychic automatism,” that Andé Breton described in defining the terms of Surrealism. Twombly had actually experimented with a kind of automatic writing during his military service in the 1950s. He would often write and draw in the dark as a way to “untrain” his hand. However, as the artist and curator Tacita Dean has pointed out, “It is wrong to relate Twombly’s marks to doodling; they come from mindfulness rather than mindlessness and are not the marks of an unconscious mind but of a knowing one. At no point has he relinquished his aesthetic control, but instead he is working from the enviable state of just below his deliberate mind, where he is no longer self-conscious or pre-imaginative. It is enviable because it is not so easy to achieve...” (T. Dean, "A Panegyric" in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 38).
This mysterious cerebral state, described as “just below the deliberate mind,” undoubtedly emanates from a place where the mind of the artist unwinds and allows the hand to do its work. It comes close to what has been described as “flow state” by athletes, artists and musicians who surrender their mind and body to a kind of zen-like focus and concentration, losing all track of time and even numbed to the sensory experiences of the body. Twombly’s paintings are the lingering relics of this state, as they abandon the safety of known language and recognizable symbols and instead revert to a kind of primal urge. In Untitled (Roman Note), Twombly’s lines speak to this almost naive yet powerful artistic impulse. They travel across space and time—emanating a kind of primal, rhythmic pulse.
Twombly’s work, then, courts legibility and illegibility in equal parts, as his notations depart the legible field of either writing or drawing and instead move into another realm entirely. “Twombly's hard-to-read hand invites the viewer (sometimes tantalizingly) to decipher the meaning of his script. But deciphering is not quite right,” the British scholar Mary Jacobus has written. “The effect...is like that of a musical score. ... Twombly's composition becomes a kind of ‘open form,’ inviting the viewer to participate in a temporal experience like that of modern music" (M. Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, Princeton, 2016, p. 51).
“... Twombly's composition becomes a kind of ‘open form,’ inviting the viewer to participate in a temporal experience like that of modern music.”(M. Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, Princeton, 2016, p. 51)
Music is perhaps a fitting metaphor in describing Twombly’s Untitled (Roman Note), as it was acquired in 1995by the legendary rock guitarist Eric Clapton, where it has been treasured for over a quarter of a century. One of the greatest living artists of all time, Clapton is also one of the world’s most accomplished art collectors, having amassed, over the years, an extensive collection of works by Gerhard Richter, Henri Matisse, and, in the present work, Twombly.