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拍品专文
Delicate pencil lines dance across the creamy surface of Cy Twombly’s Untitled, raveling into a lyrical abstraction that is punctuated with a staccato of intense red, yellow and blue crayon marks. Intimate in size, Untitled evokes an utterly irresistible aesthetic of grandeur and pulses with a passionate immediacy and exquisite dynamism that is unique to Twombly’s graphic practice. Created in 1958, the year following Twombly’s decisive move from New York to Rome, within his studio overlooking the Colosseum, Untitled articulates the artist’s emotional and intellectual response to the Eternal City in a unique pictorial language. His wordless writing recalls the incidental scratches and graffiti that have adorned the walls and streets of Rome since classical time; the infinite space of the monochromatic pale background invokes the hazy Mediterranean sunlight as well as reflecting Twombly’s critical interest in French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s conception of white paper as the blank conceptual field in which space and time, thought and image could coalesce. Untitled is an exquisite example of Twombly’s early artistic career and anticipates the following productive decade of great professional triumph.
Though reminiscent of the language of Abstract Expressionism and surrealist automatism, Twombly’s graphic fields of energy are remarkable syntheses of both emotion and intellect. As Roland Barthes succinctly put forth in what is considered one of the most influential essays on Twombly, ‘this is art according to a rare formula, at once very intellectual and very sensitive’ (R. Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, in Cy Twombly, Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, New York 1979). The marks on paper are not merely formal traces of Twombly’s ephemeral performance, but are driven by a critical exploration of the seemingly binary, yet in fact deeply intertwined, notions of presence and absence, repetition and originality, control and spontaneity that have long structured modernist conceptions of visual language and writing.
As Twombly wrote in 1957 in the Italian art journal L’Esperienza Moderna, his sole published artistic statement until 2000, ‘Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realisation. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgences rather than an abstract totality of visual perception. This is very difficult to describe, but it is an involvement in essence no matter how private, into a synthesis of feeling, intellect etc. occurring without separation in the impulse of action’ (C. Twombly, quoted in ‘Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly’, L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, August-September 1957, p. 32).
Though reminiscent of the language of Abstract Expressionism and surrealist automatism, Twombly’s graphic fields of energy are remarkable syntheses of both emotion and intellect. As Roland Barthes succinctly put forth in what is considered one of the most influential essays on Twombly, ‘this is art according to a rare formula, at once very intellectual and very sensitive’ (R. Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’, in Cy Twombly, Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, New York 1979). The marks on paper are not merely formal traces of Twombly’s ephemeral performance, but are driven by a critical exploration of the seemingly binary, yet in fact deeply intertwined, notions of presence and absence, repetition and originality, control and spontaneity that have long structured modernist conceptions of visual language and writing.
As Twombly wrote in 1957 in the Italian art journal L’Esperienza Moderna, his sole published artistic statement until 2000, ‘Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realisation. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgences rather than an abstract totality of visual perception. This is very difficult to describe, but it is an involvement in essence no matter how private, into a synthesis of feeling, intellect etc. occurring without separation in the impulse of action’ (C. Twombly, quoted in ‘Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly’, L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, August-September 1957, p. 32).