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Lot Essay
Exploding traditional genre categories of painting and drawing as well interpenetrating poetic language and marks on paper, Cy Twombly condenses and embeds the calligraphic trace in pictorial visuality. Untitled (Gaeta) brilliantly transmits evidence of Twombly's fundamental concerns with myth, allegory, and the natural world as well as presents evidence of the artist's deep commitment to the graphic line as a vehicle not only for memory but for lived experience. Using optical and associative approximations to elemental emotional and physical presence, Twombly demonstrates what he considers his "instinctive" response to the act of marking, "...not as if you were painting an object or special things, but...like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening" (C. Twombly, "Interview with David Sylvester, 2000," in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2001).
Two events converge, "happen," in this complex depiction, which define Twombly's essential concerns: his relationship to the earth--to nature--and his relationship to the act of poetic and experiential transcription. Twombly's graphic marks and inpaintings, his instinctual sense of placement and rhythm, describe perceptual evidence of the mark as visceral and cognitive expression: "The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning..." (Ibid.) It is that "ending" that we experience most palpably in the present work, in a thematic of mortality and nostalgia, of yearning and melancholy.
Painted during the summer months of July and August 2000, Untitled (Gaeta) is part of the magisterial eponymous series, which consists of six paintings of equal size, each but the last transmitting in various graphic permutations one of two poetic lines--in the first three, the line "What you have wished for is not here neither is the desire" and in fourth piece and, the present lot, "laurel leaves for an unknown poet." The first line, "What you have wished for is not here, neither is the desire" is perhaps a commentary on one of the fragments from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus ("Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only wished for").
A rendering of the second line, "laurel leaves for an unknown poet," in searing gestures, both pictorially and graphically, Untitled (Gaeta) floods the composition with allegorical, literal, and emotive inferences in its visual expressiveness of line and placement and in its specific content. Laurel leaves and their associative evocations are depicted here both in literal and painterly transcription. Considered sacred by the classical world, worn in homage to Apollo whose crown they compose, laurel leaves are as rich in symbolism as they are beguiling in shape. Twombly has schematized this shape throughout this cycle, and with special intensity in Untitled (Gaeta), giving it several aspects by means of graphite pencil, paint, and collage. A powerful symbol in the Roman world, a world of which the subtitle of this work, Gaeta--a seaside village on the Tyrrhenian coast where Twombly had a studio and garden--is a part, the laurel figures powerfully in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Twombly alludes to through reference to poetry and to the laurel. Specifically, the text analogizes the god Apollo's failed pursuit of the Naiad Daphne. Twombly heightens through sensuous shapes and colors both heightened sexuality and its withering failure. As nymph is transformed into laurel tree, Apollo"placing his hand against the trunk, felt her heart still quivering under the new bark. He clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms, and kissed the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses, and the god said 'Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree! Laurel, with you my hair will be wreathed, with you my lyre, with you my quiver. You will go with the Roman generals when joyful voices acclaim their triumph, and the Capitol witnesses their long processions. You will stand outside Augustus's doorposts, a faithful guardian, and keep watch over the crown of oak between them. And just as my head with its un-cropped hair is always young, so you also will wear the beauty of undying leaves.' Apollo had done: the laurel bowed her newly made branches, and seemed to shake her leafy crown like a head giving consent" (trans. A. S. Kline, 2000).
As laurel leaves rain down on Apollo's head, so Twombly in Untitled (Gaeta) figures his ovoid-shaped approximations in crayoned, painted, collaged, and sketched groupings, arraying three sides of the composition. Diagonal striations of leaf-shaped ovoids fall through the interior spaces, encircling and mirroring the rhythmic fall of the central poetic line parsed into three separate cascades. The unmistakable weight of the last word, "poet," the first letter in an upper case glyph, the following letters smeared, bloated, and scratched, mirror the leaf-like shapes--their fullness and drooping directional pull evoking an association with that season of the year when life becomes death and the cycle of nature's rhythms cause leaves to fall to earth in a display of shimmering chroma.
Twombly's scribbled contours mimic this metaphoric scattering of leaves, describing the "sensation of its own realization" where the artist's bodily actions transmit to paper the "actual experience of its own innate history," that is to say, the moment of pressure, the activation of mark, its deliberate scrawl and squiggle (D. Sylvester, Interview with Cy Twombly, 2000). Not only does the viewer perceive Twombly's graphemes visually, but also tactically, sensing the way in which Twombly--as Paul Klee famously remark--literally and freely takes his lines "for a walk" (P. Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. S. Moholy-Nagy, London, 1944, pp. 16-17). Here, in Untitled (Gaeta), lines are broken, zigzagged, and intersected. They are deliberately worked, mapped horizontally and vertically, carefully and forcibly. Collaged by simply stapling cut out ovoids onto the flow of blues and greens, Twombly calls attention to the constructed nature of his depiction. Yet, the painterly expressive detail extends to the ovoids' traced outlines, which reveal daubs of blues, pinks, and purples highlighted on their surfaces by drips of white paint, while tinted washes of blues and oranges are perceptible over transparent grounds. Overtly stapled, Twombly, even so, overpaints the resulting lines, at times echoing or connecting them by means of curlycues of a single dash or daub of black. The mottled surfaces and patterns of dripped lines of several of these collaged ovoids seem to expose Twombly's process of painting such "leaves" on separate surfaces, cutting them out and then reattaching them, a way of proceeding reminiscent of his work in sculpture where parts are assembled and then overpainted often in white. The revelation of slight disjunctions within the total field speaks to Twombly's deliberate and intentional arrangements, an almost architectural assemblage behind his seemingly "spontaneous" creations. Even as words may be decipherable, they are essentially unintelligible, squeezed, deformed, or slurred as Twombly's graphic statement of melancholy is elided and smeared with painterly marks over and under impasto. Yet the intention to record verbal language and associative affect is magnificently clear. As each word weaves in and out of legibility in interlacing elisions and overpaintings, the "wrong-handedness" of Twombly's inscriptions give way to a grander statement of longing and aspiration, even as the artist effects a sense that what is past is irretrievable.
From his earliest works such as Sunset, 1957, to Untitled, Captiva Island, 1974, to Some Trees of Italy, 1975-76, to the epic Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993-94, in the Museum of Modern Art, landscape has been a foundational source of inspiration for Twombly, personally and artistically. "Landscape is one of my favorite things in the world. Any kind of landscape stimulates me..." (Ibid., 46). The particular landscape from which Twombly worked in this cycle provided the setting for many painterly evocations. In Untitled (Gaeta) a deep sensuousness is inscribed the expansive field of reflecting white, recording the extraordinary light of the surrounding sea. Having entered Twombly's visual pictographs in the 1950s, the ambiguously shaped elongated ovoid carries a botanical reference, for example as inpainted contours in the Natural History Part II Trees (Laurus Nobilis) or the collaged or daubed shapes in Petals of Fire (Bassano in Teverina), 1988.
Ovoids represent stylized depictions not only botanical, but also of another kind of "natural history," that is to say, sexual imagery. Twombly's painterly gestures are corporeal, carrying with them an association with bodily excesses, not only in shape, but also in facture. Thus, Yve-Alain Bois sees in such shapes genitalia and breasts, and more literally in the painterly "blobs," what he calls Twombly's "haptic apprehension of the world," an intimation in impasto and coloration of excrement, flesh, or pools of blood (Y. Bois, "A Certain Infantile Thing," in E. Keller and R. Malin (eds.), Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros, Zurich, 2002, pp. 71-2). In Untitled (Gaeta), much as in the early Ferrogosto Cycle of 1961, Twombly indulges in the pure joy of bodily encounters with the viscosity of paint and the excitement of sexual references. "It's a sort of infantile thing, painting....Painting in a sense is an infantile thing. I mean in the handling" (C. Twombly, Interview with David Sylvester, 2000," in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 178). Whether in Willem de Kooning's Woman, 1949, or in Jean Dubuffet's Corps de Dame series of the 1950s, Twombly shares with these artists the urge to express in paint the viscous mess of infantile sexual play, their joy in sheer material corporeality.
With its dripped paint, collaged elements, smeared marks and allegorical evocations in a variety of graphic factures, Untitled (Gaeta) is not only, as Richard Wolheim states, a "container of bodily sensations," but an evocation of space and time that radiates beyond Twombly's open composition calling to mind an evocation of life and mortality, a statement of melancholic lyrical desire, which, in the merging of word and painted sign conjure the mythic poetic landscape both of a time past and present, an imago, romantic in its construct and symbolism. Untitled (Gaeta) has immense resonance in terms of Twombly's history as a painter, poet, and symbolist. It is in this sense a summation of the artist's interests in essential forms of poetic and painterly expression as well as their associative reverberations. The motif of the laurel leaf, its reference to mythic allegory and its rendering in poetic scansion and discrete painterly mark, convey both a grand elegiac statement and a haunting evocation of suspended desire.
Two events converge, "happen," in this complex depiction, which define Twombly's essential concerns: his relationship to the earth--to nature--and his relationship to the act of poetic and experiential transcription. Twombly's graphic marks and inpaintings, his instinctual sense of placement and rhythm, describe perceptual evidence of the mark as visceral and cognitive expression: "The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning..." (Ibid.) It is that "ending" that we experience most palpably in the present work, in a thematic of mortality and nostalgia, of yearning and melancholy.
Painted during the summer months of July and August 2000, Untitled (Gaeta) is part of the magisterial eponymous series, which consists of six paintings of equal size, each but the last transmitting in various graphic permutations one of two poetic lines--in the first three, the line "What you have wished for is not here neither is the desire" and in fourth piece and, the present lot, "laurel leaves for an unknown poet." The first line, "What you have wished for is not here, neither is the desire" is perhaps a commentary on one of the fragments from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus ("Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only wished for").
A rendering of the second line, "laurel leaves for an unknown poet," in searing gestures, both pictorially and graphically, Untitled (Gaeta) floods the composition with allegorical, literal, and emotive inferences in its visual expressiveness of line and placement and in its specific content. Laurel leaves and their associative evocations are depicted here both in literal and painterly transcription. Considered sacred by the classical world, worn in homage to Apollo whose crown they compose, laurel leaves are as rich in symbolism as they are beguiling in shape. Twombly has schematized this shape throughout this cycle, and with special intensity in Untitled (Gaeta), giving it several aspects by means of graphite pencil, paint, and collage. A powerful symbol in the Roman world, a world of which the subtitle of this work, Gaeta--a seaside village on the Tyrrhenian coast where Twombly had a studio and garden--is a part, the laurel figures powerfully in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Twombly alludes to through reference to poetry and to the laurel. Specifically, the text analogizes the god Apollo's failed pursuit of the Naiad Daphne. Twombly heightens through sensuous shapes and colors both heightened sexuality and its withering failure. As nymph is transformed into laurel tree, Apollo"placing his hand against the trunk, felt her heart still quivering under the new bark. He clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms, and kissed the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses, and the god said 'Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree! Laurel, with you my hair will be wreathed, with you my lyre, with you my quiver. You will go with the Roman generals when joyful voices acclaim their triumph, and the Capitol witnesses their long processions. You will stand outside Augustus's doorposts, a faithful guardian, and keep watch over the crown of oak between them. And just as my head with its un-cropped hair is always young, so you also will wear the beauty of undying leaves.' Apollo had done: the laurel bowed her newly made branches, and seemed to shake her leafy crown like a head giving consent" (trans. A. S. Kline, 2000).
As laurel leaves rain down on Apollo's head, so Twombly in Untitled (Gaeta) figures his ovoid-shaped approximations in crayoned, painted, collaged, and sketched groupings, arraying three sides of the composition. Diagonal striations of leaf-shaped ovoids fall through the interior spaces, encircling and mirroring the rhythmic fall of the central poetic line parsed into three separate cascades. The unmistakable weight of the last word, "poet," the first letter in an upper case glyph, the following letters smeared, bloated, and scratched, mirror the leaf-like shapes--their fullness and drooping directional pull evoking an association with that season of the year when life becomes death and the cycle of nature's rhythms cause leaves to fall to earth in a display of shimmering chroma.
Twombly's scribbled contours mimic this metaphoric scattering of leaves, describing the "sensation of its own realization" where the artist's bodily actions transmit to paper the "actual experience of its own innate history," that is to say, the moment of pressure, the activation of mark, its deliberate scrawl and squiggle (D. Sylvester, Interview with Cy Twombly, 2000). Not only does the viewer perceive Twombly's graphemes visually, but also tactically, sensing the way in which Twombly--as Paul Klee famously remark--literally and freely takes his lines "for a walk" (P. Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. S. Moholy-Nagy, London, 1944, pp. 16-17). Here, in Untitled (Gaeta), lines are broken, zigzagged, and intersected. They are deliberately worked, mapped horizontally and vertically, carefully and forcibly. Collaged by simply stapling cut out ovoids onto the flow of blues and greens, Twombly calls attention to the constructed nature of his depiction. Yet, the painterly expressive detail extends to the ovoids' traced outlines, which reveal daubs of blues, pinks, and purples highlighted on their surfaces by drips of white paint, while tinted washes of blues and oranges are perceptible over transparent grounds. Overtly stapled, Twombly, even so, overpaints the resulting lines, at times echoing or connecting them by means of curlycues of a single dash or daub of black. The mottled surfaces and patterns of dripped lines of several of these collaged ovoids seem to expose Twombly's process of painting such "leaves" on separate surfaces, cutting them out and then reattaching them, a way of proceeding reminiscent of his work in sculpture where parts are assembled and then overpainted often in white. The revelation of slight disjunctions within the total field speaks to Twombly's deliberate and intentional arrangements, an almost architectural assemblage behind his seemingly "spontaneous" creations. Even as words may be decipherable, they are essentially unintelligible, squeezed, deformed, or slurred as Twombly's graphic statement of melancholy is elided and smeared with painterly marks over and under impasto. Yet the intention to record verbal language and associative affect is magnificently clear. As each word weaves in and out of legibility in interlacing elisions and overpaintings, the "wrong-handedness" of Twombly's inscriptions give way to a grander statement of longing and aspiration, even as the artist effects a sense that what is past is irretrievable.
From his earliest works such as Sunset, 1957, to Untitled, Captiva Island, 1974, to Some Trees of Italy, 1975-76, to the epic Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993-94, in the Museum of Modern Art, landscape has been a foundational source of inspiration for Twombly, personally and artistically. "Landscape is one of my favorite things in the world. Any kind of landscape stimulates me..." (Ibid., 46). The particular landscape from which Twombly worked in this cycle provided the setting for many painterly evocations. In Untitled (Gaeta) a deep sensuousness is inscribed the expansive field of reflecting white, recording the extraordinary light of the surrounding sea. Having entered Twombly's visual pictographs in the 1950s, the ambiguously shaped elongated ovoid carries a botanical reference, for example as inpainted contours in the Natural History Part II Trees (Laurus Nobilis) or the collaged or daubed shapes in Petals of Fire (Bassano in Teverina), 1988.
Ovoids represent stylized depictions not only botanical, but also of another kind of "natural history," that is to say, sexual imagery. Twombly's painterly gestures are corporeal, carrying with them an association with bodily excesses, not only in shape, but also in facture. Thus, Yve-Alain Bois sees in such shapes genitalia and breasts, and more literally in the painterly "blobs," what he calls Twombly's "haptic apprehension of the world," an intimation in impasto and coloration of excrement, flesh, or pools of blood (Y. Bois, "A Certain Infantile Thing," in E. Keller and R. Malin (eds.), Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros, Zurich, 2002, pp. 71-2). In Untitled (Gaeta), much as in the early Ferrogosto Cycle of 1961, Twombly indulges in the pure joy of bodily encounters with the viscosity of paint and the excitement of sexual references. "It's a sort of infantile thing, painting....Painting in a sense is an infantile thing. I mean in the handling" (C. Twombly, Interview with David Sylvester, 2000," in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 178). Whether in Willem de Kooning's Woman, 1949, or in Jean Dubuffet's Corps de Dame series of the 1950s, Twombly shares with these artists the urge to express in paint the viscous mess of infantile sexual play, their joy in sheer material corporeality.
With its dripped paint, collaged elements, smeared marks and allegorical evocations in a variety of graphic factures, Untitled (Gaeta) is not only, as Richard Wolheim states, a "container of bodily sensations," but an evocation of space and time that radiates beyond Twombly's open composition calling to mind an evocation of life and mortality, a statement of melancholic lyrical desire, which, in the merging of word and painted sign conjure the mythic poetic landscape both of a time past and present, an imago, romantic in its construct and symbolism. Untitled (Gaeta) has immense resonance in terms of Twombly's history as a painter, poet, and symbolist. It is in this sense a summation of the artist's interests in essential forms of poetic and painterly expression as well as their associative reverberations. The motif of the laurel leaf, its reference to mythic allegory and its rendering in poetic scansion and discrete painterly mark, convey both a grand elegiac statement and a haunting evocation of suspended desire.