E mbodying a timeless elegance and talismanic mystique akin to that of lost relics from antiquity, Untitled is an enduring testament to the profound engagement with mythic narratives of the past that lies at the heart of Cy Twombly’s celebrated oeuvre. Few artists of the Twentieth Century have dramatized the line to a greater extent than Twombly, and within the present work, the line metamorphoses from a physical trace to a tangible object, suspended in space. Anchored by an earthy mass, two stems shoot upwards, embracing at the heads; gracefully intertwined, the gentle curve of one shoot contrasts with the rigidity of the other, endowing them with anthropomorphic qualities that, in addition to their captivating physical presence and immediacy, powerfully recall the artist’s greatest masterpieces on canvas. Exuding both a Hellenic classicism and a modern candor, Untitled profoundly embodies Edward Albee’s sentiment: "Among the US painters of the second half of the 20th century (and through to now) one stands out to me as painter who redefined sculpture (Robert Rauschenberg), and one emerges that rare artist equally important in both fields, equally exciting as painter and sculptor: Cy Twombly.” (Edward Albee, “Cy Twombly” in Exh. Cat., Munich, Alta Pinakothek, Cy Twombly: Sculptures 1992 – 2005, 2006, p. 9)
Twombly Sculptures in Museum Collections
Both benefiting from and reflecting Twombly’s remarkable and deeply sensual mastery of material, Untitled articulates the influence of classical antiquity and Renaissance artworks upon the artist’s oeuvre with an arresting corporeality and compelling intimacy. With their sinuous lines and almost human presence, the stems recall ancient Greek sculptures such as the Venus de Milo and Hermes of Praxiteles, as well as later compositions by the likes of Michelangelo, Bernini and Donatello. Indeed, the robust presence of myth in the present work, which mirrors an overall tendency in Twombly’s painting, is indebted to the artist’s increasing fascination with the ancient history of the Mediterranean following his move to Italy in 1957. There, surrounded by the rich cultural tapestry of classical antiquity embedded in the winding streets and crumbling citadels of the ancient city, Twombly’s abstract vernacular acquired a Hellenic classicism and mythic significance that is emphatically articulated in the present work. Enduringly fascinated with the residual influence of the past on the present, Twombly’s sculptures—which exhibit not only the rustic patina and totemic gravity of archaeological relics, but actively revisit the sculptural tropes of antiquity—firmly attest to Rosalind Krauss’s thesis, “modern sculpture was born from classical archaeology.”(Rosalind Krauss, “Objet (Petit) a,” in: Exh. Cat., Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Part Object, Part Sculpture, 2005, p. 85) Echoing this sentiment, Nicholas Cullinan reflects, “To encounter the past is to put into question the present. This sense of awe and perplexity at overlaid tenses and times and encountering places only previously known in the imagination... offered for Twombly a palimpsest of past, present and future; layered, intertwined and interpenetrating each other like archaeological strata.” (Nicholas Cullinan in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, 2008, p. 74)
Whilst Twombly’s earlier sculptures utilized ephemeral materials such as cardboard, cloth, wood and house paint, the fragility of such components urged his transition to casting in bronze in the early 1980s. Making the forms inherently more durable, Twombly described the process of casting as an effort to "unify the thing. It abstracts the forms from the material. People want to know about what the material constituents are; it helps them identify the work with something. But I want each sculpture to be seen as a whole, as a sculpture." (Cy Twombly quoted in: David Sylvester, "The World is Light," in Nicola del Roscio ed., Writings on Twombly, Munich, 2002, p. 276) Beyond this, the passage to bronze also emulated the practice of Greek and Roman artists and furthered his link to antiquity. However, as he had when using found objects to compose his sculptures, Twombly did not shy away from his materials even after this shift to bronze. The present work emphasizes the venal, raw energy of the material, and the form is mimetic of something found in nature. Cast from a flower, the work speaks to a wider interest in flora in the artist’s practice; the form of the present work is particularly evocative of the artist’s celebrated Blossom paintings, which dominated his practice in the early years of the Twentieth Century before a return to mythology with his next great cycle, the Bacchus paintings. Executed in the years immediately preceding these extraordinary series, Untitled eloquently combines Twombly’s two fascinations, effortlessly testifying to the visual lyricism of an artist at simultaneously his most minimal and most inventive. What could be more poetic, or more aligned with the Metamorphoses, than two flowers, frozen in time and space, the nymph Daphne at the point of capture? An exquisite blend of unassuming simplicity and timeless grandeur, modern form and classical influence, Untitled attests to Twombly’s own assessment, when asked to address his sculptural oeuvre: “Actually…There’s a certain perfection in most of them.” (the artist quoted in: Kate Nesin, Cy Twombly’s Things, New Haven 2014, p. 5)
