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拍品專文
Cy Twombly's Untitled from 1958 is a gorgeous illustration of the artist's iconic scribbles, dispersed poetically across the picture plane with a delicate touch. Like so many of Twombly's works, it exudes elegance and beauty, while establishing a complex concurrence of modern abstraction and classical lyricism.
This 1958 painting on paper on canvas is a constellation of rhythmic markings that dance across the expansive surface, emerging from and disappearing into a serenely white background. Two tightly woven scribbles hover gracefully in the composition's center. They are enveloped by two larger and unfurled scrawlings, each dissected by a purposeful line. A trio of bold scribbles at the paper's base visually anchors the composition, while on the left side, a scattering of lines precariously approaches its edge.
Twombly began living in Rome in 1957, several years after a visit to the city had provoked a momentous fascination within him. Executed during the second year of his stay, Untitled is a key work from a significant era in the artist's life - an era that would continue to impact his style and output for the remainder of his career. During this period, he painted a series of works that materialized from a dramatic convergence of elements: Twombly's innate stylistic predilections, his early artistic foundations and new and crucial environmental influences. Enchanted with the city's rich history and its legacy of classical, medieval and Renaissance masters, Twombly absorbed his surroundings and channeled his interpretations through his own works. His command of pictorial space, as evidenced here in Untitled, was largely shaped by the city's resplendent masterpieces that Twombly observed and studied with avidity. "For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)." (Twombly, quoted in R. Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, London, 2005, p. 98).
In some works from this period, words such as "Arcadia" and "Olympia" emerge clearly from the picture plane, serving as direct citations of these influences. In others, as in Untitled, decipherability hovers on the edge of legibility. These works merge Twombly's own notion of cryptographic script with his Roman surroundings, where an aggregation of palimpsest-like scratches and scrawls of graffiti decorate the city's walls and monuments, contributed by a collective of Romans spanning thousands of years. Untitled is one of the most evocative works from this period, an apogee of the influences that came together to shape Twombly's career and a rare example from this period to come to the market.
These scribbles are neither products of Surrealist automatism, nor are they predetermined markings of graffiti. They are as organized as they are impetuous, as judicious as they are instinctive, a cooperation between self-conscious and unconscious states of mind. Untitled is a demonstration of the restraint Twombly maintains as his hand traverses the surface, teetering somewhere between control and spontaneity. "It is the forming of the image, the compulsive action of becoming, the direct and indirect pressures brought to a climax in the acute act of forming" that is central to the way he paints. (C. Twombly, Documenti, op. cit., p. 32).
This 1958 painting on paper on canvas is a constellation of rhythmic markings that dance across the expansive surface, emerging from and disappearing into a serenely white background. Two tightly woven scribbles hover gracefully in the composition's center. They are enveloped by two larger and unfurled scrawlings, each dissected by a purposeful line. A trio of bold scribbles at the paper's base visually anchors the composition, while on the left side, a scattering of lines precariously approaches its edge.
Twombly began living in Rome in 1957, several years after a visit to the city had provoked a momentous fascination within him. Executed during the second year of his stay, Untitled is a key work from a significant era in the artist's life - an era that would continue to impact his style and output for the remainder of his career. During this period, he painted a series of works that materialized from a dramatic convergence of elements: Twombly's innate stylistic predilections, his early artistic foundations and new and crucial environmental influences. Enchanted with the city's rich history and its legacy of classical, medieval and Renaissance masters, Twombly absorbed his surroundings and channeled his interpretations through his own works. His command of pictorial space, as evidenced here in Untitled, was largely shaped by the city's resplendent masterpieces that Twombly observed and studied with avidity. "For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)." (Twombly, quoted in R. Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, London, 2005, p. 98).
In some works from this period, words such as "Arcadia" and "Olympia" emerge clearly from the picture plane, serving as direct citations of these influences. In others, as in Untitled, decipherability hovers on the edge of legibility. These works merge Twombly's own notion of cryptographic script with his Roman surroundings, where an aggregation of palimpsest-like scratches and scrawls of graffiti decorate the city's walls and monuments, contributed by a collective of Romans spanning thousands of years. Untitled is one of the most evocative works from this period, an apogee of the influences that came together to shape Twombly's career and a rare example from this period to come to the market.
These scribbles are neither products of Surrealist automatism, nor are they predetermined markings of graffiti. They are as organized as they are impetuous, as judicious as they are instinctive, a cooperation between self-conscious and unconscious states of mind. Untitled is a demonstration of the restraint Twombly maintains as his hand traverses the surface, teetering somewhere between control and spontaneity. "It is the forming of the image, the compulsive action of becoming, the direct and indirect pressures brought to a climax in the acute act of forming" that is central to the way he paints. (C. Twombly, Documenti, op. cit., p. 32).