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Lot Essay
“Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception”—Cy Twombly
(C. Twombly, quoted by K. Varnadoe, "Inscriptions in Arcadia," in N. del Roscio, ed., The Essential Cy Twombly, 2014, p. 67).
“Twombly had an incontestable mastery over line, its capacity to generate new form and to stimulate fresh potency”—Heiner Bastian
(H. Bastian, Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume II 1961-65, Munich, 1993, p. 21).
Painted in Italy during the summer of 1969, Cy Twombly’s Bolsena paintings are regarded by many scholars as the summation of the artist’s exploration of the free-flowing nature of the line. The supple, twisting and unbridled marks that navigate their way across the surface of this elegant canvas are the natural extension of the mark-making that had established Twombly as one of the most inquisitive and innovative artists of his generation. Occupying a place between representation and symbolism, Untitled [Bolsena] is one of just fourteen paintings the artist painted during a stay on the shores of Lake Bolsena (other examples are in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Broad, and Bayerische Staatsgemäldessammlungen—Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Modern München), the present work expresses Twombly’s interest in the expansive nature of history yet also speaks to the contemporary. One of the most evocative and lyrical works in the series, this is a triumphal example of the artist’s exacting contribution to the twentieth-century canon.
Twombly’s mastery of his line can be seen in the elegant amalgamation of the lithe traces and symbolic gestures that play out across the surface of this expansive canvas. From free-flowing lines to more torrid loops and swirls, the full repertoire of the artist’s gestures is on display. This multifaceted composition is the result of Twombly’s free-flowing hand tracing out anonymous forms, but it is also populated by signs and symbols infused with meaning. The lines are symbolic of the purity and timelessness of the artist’s mark making, while the scattering of dates, numbers, names, and even the artist’s expansive signature, anchor the work very much in the present. “Twombly had an incontestable mastery over line,” Heiner Bastion—the author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné—once wrote, “it [has the] capacity to generate new form and to stimulate fresh potency” (Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume II 1961-65, Munich, 1993, p. 21).
Untitled [Bolsena] was painted during Twombly’s stay at Palazzo del Drago, the soaring Renaissance palace on the shores of Lago di Bolsena in Italy. The artist had settled in the picturesque Tuscan hills after a two-year period of peripatetic activity traveling between Italy, New York, Florida and the Caribbean. He would stay in the town in a state of comparative solitude for almost six months, and this newfound sense of stability seemed to have unleashed within Twombly a new sense of innovation and painterly adventure. Bolsena provided Twombly with a sense of certainty and longevity, which had so often sparked his artistic abilities in the past. Surrounded by the history of Italy and absorbed in the historic events of July 1969, Twombly reacts to history in the making.
In July 1969, the American spaceflight Apollo 11 became the first mission to land men on the surface of the moon. As he worked on his new suite of paintings, Twombly listened to the excited coverage of this momentous occasion on the radio, enthralled by the history-making events that were taking place thousands of miles away in space. The constant stream of scientific data, together with talk of vectors, orbits, and trajectories, filtered into his imagination and manifested themselves onto the surface of his canvases in the disparate loops, swirls, numbers and cryptic cyphers that populate Untitled [Bolsena]. “In these paintings reside real as well as imagined confrontations,” notes Bastian, “lit by the reflection of actual things as if by a radiance cast by marvelous happenstance; and all with freely changes temper as it navigates pathways warped by a reeling, gravimatic tow” (ibid, p. 32).
Yet, as with much of Twombly’s work, this painting also has its origins in the past. When the artist moved from the United States to Italy in the 1950s, he became fascinated by the Roman graffiti that he observed around him on a daily basis. He was captivated by the idea of the “living history” of the city, and the fact that Romans had been living this same history for millennia. Twombly also spent many hours absorbing the artistic legacy of the city, seeing in person many of the Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces that he had previously only experienced from images reproduced in books. He would have been acutely aware of Raphael’s masterpiece The Mass of Bolsena (1512-1514; Apostolic Palace, Vatican City) for example, and his fascination with the artist had already spurned him to make two of his own interpretations of the masters paintings, namely The School of Athens (1509-1511; Apostolic Palace, Vatican City) and Triumph of Galatea (ca. 1512; Villa Farnesina, Rome). While the present work does not reproduce the same narrative imagery as Raphael’s frescos, it does share the horizontality of the narrative progression of his Renaissance counterpart’s work.
The Bolsena paintings are located at an important juncture in the artist’s career, coming after his triumphal Blackboard paintings begun the year prior, and just before his poetic Nini’s Paintings and Orion canvases from the early 1970s. The majestic loops and swirls of his Blackboards were perhaps the purest example of his much quoted adage: “Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception” (quoted in K. Varnadoe, "Inscriptions in Arcadia," in N. del Roscio, ed., The Essential Cy Twombly, 2014, p. 67). Their rhythmic, roiling forms were the artist’s attempts to attain true artistic freedom. Twombly taught himself to “de-skill” the gesture, in effect to eradicate the habits of artists throughout history, to disconnect his hand from his eye. This was his sly wink at de Kooning and Rothko’s sanctification of the emotive power of the painterly gesture. Instead, Twombly sought in his own “gesture” to remove himself psychologically and manually from his forebears. In the process, he also sought to position himself not only outside that earlier stylistic arena, but to create a more intensely personal relationship with his own production.
As Varnedoe has stated of these paintings, “These are ‘signature’ images in several senses—because they ostensibly present an abstracted, wordless essence of handwriting… and because they vividly embody, again and in renewed form, the artist’s willingness to take on the most unpromising premises as the basis of his art” (ibid., p. 74). Twombly’s “auto” or “proto-calligraphy” markings fall “rhythmically” over the surface, as Roland Barthes writes (Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, New York, 2005, p. 19). In the present work, we can see Twombly’s aesthetic radicality—“[a] personal art… out of means which appear so studiously, so implacably artless” (ibid., p. 74)—an uncanny familiarity where the artist’s “auto-calligraphic” stream of markings trace a personal and poignant autographic statement that could well be our own.
Traces of the majestic loops that comprised the Blackboard paintings can be found in upper register of Untitled [Bolsena], which are in turn contrasted by the horizontal lines that populate the lower portion of the canvas. In these new paintings, Twombly also reverts back to using primarily “white” canvases, after a period working almost exclusively with a grey ground. This adoption of what has often mistakenly referred to as “empty space” was a central feature of Twombly’s oeuvre. He readily admitted that he felt more affinity with the surface of the work than the marks he often placed upon it and, as the critic Gillo Dorfles has noted, they are central to the artist aesthetic: “Vast white spaces… are the voids which for Twombly have the power of color and matter and are, actually, the ‘fullest’ part of the picture” (G. Dorfles quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, "Cy Twombly," in Artforum, April 1974, via https://www.artforum.com/print/197404/cy-twombly-36116).
This unique use of space also recalls the origins of Twombly’s Italian works. Together with the rich variety of his gestural marks, it evokes memories of the walls onto which the Roman graffiti that artist saw around him on a daily basis had been scrawled. Even as a child growing up in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly was beguiled by the city. Nicola Del Roscio, the artist's lifelong assistant and friend, has recalled Twombly’s mother telling a story about how as a young boy, Twombly would often repeat: “When I grow up I’ll go to Rome!” His first visit to Rome came many years later during a trip to Europe with Robert Rauschenberg, who he had met at art school in New York. Travelling on a grant, the new friends left America in 1952 to explore Europe and North Africa for the first time. They arrived in Rome, and from there went on to Florence, Siena, Assisi and Venice, before journeying to France, Spain and Morocco. This love affair with Italy would last for the rest of the artist’s life and result in the some of the most celebrated paintings of the postwar period.
Twombly’s ability to blend ancient and modern, the classical and the contemporary, is unique in the twentieth-century canon. His celebration of the simplicity of the mark rejected the self-imposed heroic grandeur of Abstract Expressionism, and added humanity to the austerity of what would become Minimalism. 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 [Bolsena], Twombly’s lines speak to this inscrutable yet powerful artistic impulse; they travel across both time and space—emanating a kind of beautiful, poetic, rhythmic force.
(C. Twombly, quoted by K. Varnadoe, "Inscriptions in Arcadia," in N. del Roscio, ed., The Essential Cy Twombly, 2014, p. 67).
“Twombly had an incontestable mastery over line, its capacity to generate new form and to stimulate fresh potency”—Heiner Bastian
(H. Bastian, Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume II 1961-65, Munich, 1993, p. 21).
Painted in Italy during the summer of 1969, Cy Twombly’s Bolsena paintings are regarded by many scholars as the summation of the artist’s exploration of the free-flowing nature of the line. The supple, twisting and unbridled marks that navigate their way across the surface of this elegant canvas are the natural extension of the mark-making that had established Twombly as one of the most inquisitive and innovative artists of his generation. Occupying a place between representation and symbolism, Untitled [Bolsena] is one of just fourteen paintings the artist painted during a stay on the shores of Lake Bolsena (other examples are in the collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Broad, and Bayerische Staatsgemäldessammlungen—Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Modern München), the present work expresses Twombly’s interest in the expansive nature of history yet also speaks to the contemporary. One of the most evocative and lyrical works in the series, this is a triumphal example of the artist’s exacting contribution to the twentieth-century canon.
Twombly’s mastery of his line can be seen in the elegant amalgamation of the lithe traces and symbolic gestures that play out across the surface of this expansive canvas. From free-flowing lines to more torrid loops and swirls, the full repertoire of the artist’s gestures is on display. This multifaceted composition is the result of Twombly’s free-flowing hand tracing out anonymous forms, but it is also populated by signs and symbols infused with meaning. The lines are symbolic of the purity and timelessness of the artist’s mark making, while the scattering of dates, numbers, names, and even the artist’s expansive signature, anchor the work very much in the present. “Twombly had an incontestable mastery over line,” Heiner Bastion—the author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné—once wrote, “it [has the] capacity to generate new form and to stimulate fresh potency” (Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume II 1961-65, Munich, 1993, p. 21).
Untitled [Bolsena] was painted during Twombly’s stay at Palazzo del Drago, the soaring Renaissance palace on the shores of Lago di Bolsena in Italy. The artist had settled in the picturesque Tuscan hills after a two-year period of peripatetic activity traveling between Italy, New York, Florida and the Caribbean. He would stay in the town in a state of comparative solitude for almost six months, and this newfound sense of stability seemed to have unleashed within Twombly a new sense of innovation and painterly adventure. Bolsena provided Twombly with a sense of certainty and longevity, which had so often sparked his artistic abilities in the past. Surrounded by the history of Italy and absorbed in the historic events of July 1969, Twombly reacts to history in the making.
In July 1969, the American spaceflight Apollo 11 became the first mission to land men on the surface of the moon. As he worked on his new suite of paintings, Twombly listened to the excited coverage of this momentous occasion on the radio, enthralled by the history-making events that were taking place thousands of miles away in space. The constant stream of scientific data, together with talk of vectors, orbits, and trajectories, filtered into his imagination and manifested themselves onto the surface of his canvases in the disparate loops, swirls, numbers and cryptic cyphers that populate Untitled [Bolsena]. “In these paintings reside real as well as imagined confrontations,” notes Bastian, “lit by the reflection of actual things as if by a radiance cast by marvelous happenstance; and all with freely changes temper as it navigates pathways warped by a reeling, gravimatic tow” (ibid, p. 32).
Yet, as with much of Twombly’s work, this painting also has its origins in the past. When the artist moved from the United States to Italy in the 1950s, he became fascinated by the Roman graffiti that he observed around him on a daily basis. He was captivated by the idea of the “living history” of the city, and the fact that Romans had been living this same history for millennia. Twombly also spent many hours absorbing the artistic legacy of the city, seeing in person many of the Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces that he had previously only experienced from images reproduced in books. He would have been acutely aware of Raphael’s masterpiece The Mass of Bolsena (1512-1514; Apostolic Palace, Vatican City) for example, and his fascination with the artist had already spurned him to make two of his own interpretations of the masters paintings, namely The School of Athens (1509-1511; Apostolic Palace, Vatican City) and Triumph of Galatea (ca. 1512; Villa Farnesina, Rome). While the present work does not reproduce the same narrative imagery as Raphael’s frescos, it does share the horizontality of the narrative progression of his Renaissance counterpart’s work.
The Bolsena paintings are located at an important juncture in the artist’s career, coming after his triumphal Blackboard paintings begun the year prior, and just before his poetic Nini’s Paintings and Orion canvases from the early 1970s. The majestic loops and swirls of his Blackboards were perhaps the purest example of his much quoted adage: “Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception” (quoted in K. Varnadoe, "Inscriptions in Arcadia," in N. del Roscio, ed., The Essential Cy Twombly, 2014, p. 67). Their rhythmic, roiling forms were the artist’s attempts to attain true artistic freedom. Twombly taught himself to “de-skill” the gesture, in effect to eradicate the habits of artists throughout history, to disconnect his hand from his eye. This was his sly wink at de Kooning and Rothko’s sanctification of the emotive power of the painterly gesture. Instead, Twombly sought in his own “gesture” to remove himself psychologically and manually from his forebears. In the process, he also sought to position himself not only outside that earlier stylistic arena, but to create a more intensely personal relationship with his own production.
As Varnedoe has stated of these paintings, “These are ‘signature’ images in several senses—because they ostensibly present an abstracted, wordless essence of handwriting… and because they vividly embody, again and in renewed form, the artist’s willingness to take on the most unpromising premises as the basis of his art” (ibid., p. 74). Twombly’s “auto” or “proto-calligraphy” markings fall “rhythmically” over the surface, as Roland Barthes writes (Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper, New York, 2005, p. 19). In the present work, we can see Twombly’s aesthetic radicality—“[a] personal art… out of means which appear so studiously, so implacably artless” (ibid., p. 74)—an uncanny familiarity where the artist’s “auto-calligraphic” stream of markings trace a personal and poignant autographic statement that could well be our own.
Traces of the majestic loops that comprised the Blackboard paintings can be found in upper register of Untitled [Bolsena], which are in turn contrasted by the horizontal lines that populate the lower portion of the canvas. In these new paintings, Twombly also reverts back to using primarily “white” canvases, after a period working almost exclusively with a grey ground. This adoption of what has often mistakenly referred to as “empty space” was a central feature of Twombly’s oeuvre. He readily admitted that he felt more affinity with the surface of the work than the marks he often placed upon it and, as the critic Gillo Dorfles has noted, they are central to the artist aesthetic: “Vast white spaces… are the voids which for Twombly have the power of color and matter and are, actually, the ‘fullest’ part of the picture” (G. Dorfles quoted in R. Pincus-Witten, "Cy Twombly," in Artforum, April 1974, via https://www.artforum.com/print/197404/cy-twombly-36116).
This unique use of space also recalls the origins of Twombly’s Italian works. Together with the rich variety of his gestural marks, it evokes memories of the walls onto which the Roman graffiti that artist saw around him on a daily basis had been scrawled. Even as a child growing up in Lexington, Virginia, Twombly was beguiled by the city. Nicola Del Roscio, the artist's lifelong assistant and friend, has recalled Twombly’s mother telling a story about how as a young boy, Twombly would often repeat: “When I grow up I’ll go to Rome!” His first visit to Rome came many years later during a trip to Europe with Robert Rauschenberg, who he had met at art school in New York. Travelling on a grant, the new friends left America in 1952 to explore Europe and North Africa for the first time. They arrived in Rome, and from there went on to Florence, Siena, Assisi and Venice, before journeying to France, Spain and Morocco. This love affair with Italy would last for the rest of the artist’s life and result in the some of the most celebrated paintings of the postwar period.
Twombly’s ability to blend ancient and modern, the classical and the contemporary, is unique in the twentieth-century canon. His celebration of the simplicity of the mark rejected the self-imposed heroic grandeur of Abstract Expressionism, and added humanity to the austerity of what would become Minimalism. 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 [Bolsena], Twombly’s lines speak to this inscrutable yet powerful artistic impulse; they travel across both time and space—emanating a kind of beautiful, poetic, rhythmic force.