Cy Twombly

Libreria Stampatori, Turin
Galleria Notizie, Turin
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a short line of intermittent rubbing towards the right of the extreme top edge, which is probably inherent to the artist's method.
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"To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release; and by crisis it should by no means be limited to a morbid state, but could just as well be one ecstatic impulse, or in the process of painting, run a gamut of states." the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art,  Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1994, p. 27

"The meaning of the work is in the doing of it"
Cy Twombly, 'Signs', L'Esperienza moderna, no.2, August/September 1957

Twombly's work in the 1960s and 1970s investigates the process of drawing, which veers towards - and eventually becomes - an exploration of writing. Executed in 1971, Untitled follows Twombly's return to Rome where we begin to see the signature of the decoder unveiled to present his fondness for ephemeral pictures and the cryptic. During this period Twombly began to enlarge and use his signature as an expressive element, and adopting a segment of proto-writing expressed as small segments reminiscent of the fluctuating rows of running loops that have been compared with basic Palmer Method exercises used by School children. The present work epitomises the way these signatures ostensibly present an abstracted wordless essence of the handwriting that is associated with so much of Twombly's work. As this work testifies, the artist analyses the nature of visual cognition and communication by investigating semiotic sign systems: by experimenting with indeterminate iconography he questions the assumptions of conventional visual vocabularies, frames of reference, and sign systems. Consequently, as the renowned critic and philosopher Roland Barthes comments, "What happens on the stage Twombly offers us (whether it is canvas or paper) is something which partakes of several kinds of event" (Roland Barthes in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, 1979, p. 9). As with Twombly's best output Untitled mediates the boundary between figuration and abstraction, continually enticing the viewer with implied meaning and challenging the cognitive deductions inherent to signifier-referent equations. Although Twombly interrogates the ways in which artistic transactions function, this work also initiates a powerful visual effect. Indeed, this drawing stands as physical manifestation of the maxim of Twombly's forerunner, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé: "Everything happens by shortcut...story telling is avoided".

After the close of the Treatise on the Veil series in the mid 1960s Twombly broke the continuity of the dark-ground phase and introduced a different space, colour, surface and vocabulary of moving forms. In the present work we see Twombly using his linear vocabulary in pencil and crayon on a light-ground as he expresses notations and imagery in the typical movement of these forms from upper left to lower right in a downward-spilling cascade. The right portion of the composition of Untitled contains faint horizontal lines and thin impasto that subtly establish a contrast between light and dark and provide the arena for competing strengths of mark-making. This organic drawing process illuminates the medium itself and often forces the strokes to become their own subject. Twombly broke with convention by creating drawings that consisted of automatic writing coming from within rather than the representation of anything, which subsequently became a principle that underlay his output.

In spite of Twombly's graphic reduction and pared down palette, the present work brims with an abundance of energy, intense complexity and a sense of serenity. We are invited to contemplate whether, buried within his drawing are hidden messages designed for our dissection. Mediating a space between spontaneity and control, his scribbles are full of suggestive details but remain irresolute. By replacing the coloured organicism of Pollock with colourless lines whose steady, progressive rise and fall insists on their attachment to the constraint of writing, Twombly reveals his interest in measurements and rhythms. Unique to the artists approach is a myriad of esoteric cultural references that serve to communicate an interpretation of poetry, mythology, history and modernity, of which the present work is a consummate example.