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Lot Essay
A subtle, intimate scape of scratches, whorls and cypher-like scrawls grows across Cy Twombly’s Untitled. Created in 1961, the effusion of delicate marks, slashed pinks and creamy browns typifies the artist’s work of the period where sweeping movements extend across the surface to evoke an imagined terrain strewn with the wreckage of sublime thought. Shifting between clarity and commotion, the organic and the imagined, an early manifestation of Twombly’s singular, lyrical idiom can be seen in Untitled. The marks are a proof of movement and of life yet are nevertheless almost entirely absorbed within the bleached haze of the background; Twombly’s rhetoric is enigmatic, a proliferation of recognizable yet ungraspable associations, where melding, erasing and withholding are very much at play. Indeed, the dance between abstraction and figuration would become one of the unifying themes of his practice. The present work is a remarkable accrual of multi-layered signs and symbols, evoking a tactility and a palpable, burning urgency of feeling: as the artist himself noted, ‘It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening’ (C. Twombly in an interview with D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists New Haven and London, 2001, p. 179).
The 1960s were a prolific decade for Twombly, coinciding with his move to Rome from New York in 1957; by 1961, he was permanently settled in the city and was renting a studio in Piazza del Biscione near Campo de’ Fiori. For over a decade he had been drawn to Italy for its culture, antiquity and definitive sense of place rooted in the country’s rich history: ‘For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)’ (C. Twombly quoted in R. Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, London, 2005, p. 98). Recalling the ancient graffiti of Pompei, the palimpsest of Untitled revels in its own sense of time, offering visible proof of an accretion of events, both artistic and experiential. Having grown up in Virginia, where the ghostly undercurrent of an antebellum existence still rippled, Twombly was acutely aware of the poetry of memory, and in Rome, where the city’s still-standing monuments live alongside contemporary edifices, the condensed form of the longue durée enchanted the artist. This aesthetic of overlapping temporalities underpins Untitled in which the image of history is completely, and ecstatically, submissive to the line. Essentially a material trace of the artist’s own hand, each of Twombly’s tracks and smudges is its own a potent relationship with the timeless.
The 1960s were a prolific decade for Twombly, coinciding with his move to Rome from New York in 1957; by 1961, he was permanently settled in the city and was renting a studio in Piazza del Biscione near Campo de’ Fiori. For over a decade he had been drawn to Italy for its culture, antiquity and definitive sense of place rooted in the country’s rich history: ‘For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)’ (C. Twombly quoted in R. Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, London, 2005, p. 98). Recalling the ancient graffiti of Pompei, the palimpsest of Untitled revels in its own sense of time, offering visible proof of an accretion of events, both artistic and experiential. Having grown up in Virginia, where the ghostly undercurrent of an antebellum existence still rippled, Twombly was acutely aware of the poetry of memory, and in Rome, where the city’s still-standing monuments live alongside contemporary edifices, the condensed form of the longue durée enchanted the artist. This aesthetic of overlapping temporalities underpins Untitled in which the image of history is completely, and ecstatically, submissive to the line. Essentially a material trace of the artist’s own hand, each of Twombly’s tracks and smudges is its own a potent relationship with the timeless.