CY TWOMBLY | Untitled

Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, Paris
Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Private Collection, Germany
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Zurich, Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Cy Twombly. Drawings and 8 Sculptures, June - September 1990

Georg Frei, Ed., Souvenirs of D’Arros and Gaeta. Drawings by Cy Twombly, Zurich 1992, n.p., illustrated in colour Nicola Del Roscio, Cy Twombly: Drawings, Cat. Rais., Vol. 8, 1990-2011, Munich 2017, p. 60, no. 59, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is pinker and more vibrant in the original. The illustration fails to fully convey the texture of the paint and the purple pigment is more deep in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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In Untitled by Cy Twombly, the opposing forces of text and form, mark and void, nature and the divine, collide with an expressive potency. Executed in 1990, the present work was painted in the latter years of Twombly’s illustrious career, in which the artist increasingly turned to bold colour and the themes of time and temporality. Indeed, colour utterly dominates the present work as painterly palimpsests swell and morph in the lower half of the picture plane. Shades of indigo, aquamarine, crimson, and orange russet crackle with palpable electricity in which there is a definite sense of spring in bloom. Perhaps the most pertinent precursor for Twombly’s almost Fauvist use of colour here is found in André Derain’s artistic production and, profoundly, Twombly’s Monet-like reverie espouses a peaceful tranquillity. Simultaneously, however, the performative tagging of CT. May 10 90, inherent to the artist’s eminent style, in tandem with Twombly’s feverish brushstrokes, champions an indignant sense of brutality. Departing from the graphic linearity of the 1960s and 1970s, Twombly turned towards the fully expressive and gestural use of paint in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming more painterly in his later years. By 2008, when he undertook a major exhibition at Tate Modern, Twombly revealed yet another new direction in his oeuvre: the Rose paintings. Indeed, Twombly had dwelt before on the symbolism of flowers in a 1985 polyptich that is now held in the Menil Collection, Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair. Describing Twombly’s studio during the fruition of the Tate exhibition Cycles and Seasons, Nicholas Cullinan describes the artist’s studio: “Tacked up on Twombly’s studio wall is a small arrangement of images of roses. Loosely painted late Renoir flower paintings jostle with eighteenth-century still lifes ripe with abundance; a postcard of a simple photograph of a rose in full bloom sits opposite the late Pierre Bonnard painting, Nature morte au melon 1941, of a yellow melon and a bowl of peaches rendered in swirling, interlocking greens and reds” (Nicolas Cullinan, ‘Between Roses and Shadows’ in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, 2008, p. 229). Inscribed ‘Rosa’, the present work ought to be considered a pivotal case study for this mature period.

The tension between the graphic qualities of linear inscription and the sensual materiality of paint is central to the impact of the present work. This runs parallel to a tension between intellectual cultural history and intuitive emotional expression enacted in Twombly’s paintings. Classical mythology, literature and historical works of art are appropriated and translated into a visual response that is tactile, visceral and aesthetic. For what is remarkable about Twombly, and is perfectly embodied in the present work, is the way in which he empowered his brushstrokes with the capacity to both delineate and to represent the flux of visual expression. As Harald Szeeman concludes, “no other artist has such a gift for open endedness… words become lines expressive of feeling, lines become tones, tones become tensions, white becomes resolution. All this happens with the flowing naturalness of handwriting… this work seems to us both primeval and innovative, like memory itself and its energies” (Harald Szeeman, Cy Twombly, Munich 1987, p. 12).

As the artist remarks, “Generally speaking my art has evolved out of the interest in symbols abstracted, but nevertheless humanistic; formal as most arts are in their archaic and classic stages, and a deeply aesthetic sense of eroded or ancient surfaces of time” (Cy Twombly cited in: Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Cy Twombly, 1989, p. 199). The intriguing outcome is a work that freely oscillates between the faculties of painting and language to create a markedly lyrical and unique form of abstraction. No artist of the Twentieth Century has dramatised so expressively or incisively the range and force of the drawn line and painted mark as Cy Twombly.