Untitled

Following Cy Twombly’s momentous move to Rome in 1957 came one of the most defining periods of his career, one that would result in works that fully harnessed the dynamic power of the line. The artist’s continued captivation with the artistic output of the Italian Renaissance allowed him to cleverly bridge the gap between the early modern and contemporary. He once referred to his time in Italy as an “enormous awakening of finding many wonderful rooms in a house that you never knew existed” (C. Twombly quoted in K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 17). The present untitled work is drawn from Luca Signorelli’s The Damned Cast into Hell, a 16^th century fresco in which demons wrest with those who bear the weight of perdition. Twombly impressively transforms the writhing forms of the unfortunate souls into crashing waves of curvilinear lines. An expressive ode to antiquarianism, Untitled revels in its references while traversing the dichotomies of good and evil, as well as naturalism and abstraction, to compelling effect.

Untitled may initially appear as a nebulous haze, but the drawing’s frenzied lyricism is grounded by his consideration of San Brizio Chapel’s architectural structure. A rounded arch presides over the mass of looping curlicues and linear dashes, as Twombly intersperses his characteristic text into the clustered aggregations. His signature mirrors the shape of the arch, while a strategically placed “A” standing in for a demon in flight and the woman he torments center the pyramidal composition. The numbers one through four represent a chaotic aerial arrangement of demons and humans. The minimalistically rendered sky, which Twombly emphasizes through a series of recurring diagonal strokes in cerulean is the backdrop to these contorted figures. This dramatic scene exists entirely on one plane, explosively pushing the hysteric forms into our space.

Even in this abstract mode, the artist maintains the overt musculature that fascinated his predecessors, casting globular forms into the fore that comprise the pronounced abdomens and buttocks of the tormented and their aggressors. The lurid tonality of the demons’ skin persists in the scramble of earthy lines and inky blots, accentuating their unorthodox nature. Even more impressive is Twombly’s ability to push the boundaries of his mediums with unexpected layering of colors. A blazing fire to the center left contains sfumato-esque qualities that envelops the damned while emerald green peeks through a wall of pastel pink to reveal another demonic form. Strict horizontal lines demarcate the volatile pandemonium occupying the lower portion of the drawing from the angelic order of the upper right. A darkened black grid is situated over a line of red “X’s” as wispy whirlwinds above have a level of containment that differentiates them from the spectacle they are perched over.

Twombly’s adeptness at conjoining the past with the present and incorporating textual elements into visual narratives invites careful introspection into the meaning of language and representation. Thierry Greub emphasizes that “Twombly’s use of lettering as part of the painterly gesture combines two fundamentally different artistic modes of articulation within the same pictorial entity...In order to prevent either of those pictorial modes from becoming dominant, they are placed in dynamic interaction with one another” (T. Greub, The Essential Cy Twombly, New York, 2014, pp. 230-231). In this regard, the artist deftly disrupts the more typical frames of abstraction, while maintaining a semiotic balance that he has seamlessly infused into Untitled.