In its unrestrained expression of color, gesture, and motif, Cy Twombly’s epic Untitled from 2007 is a commanding and irrefutable embodiment of the energy and inspiration that characterize the artist’s late career. Spanning over 18 feet in length, the present work is one of a group of six monumental paintings known as A Scattering of Blossoms that, in their extraordinary scale and arresting graphic force, stand amongst the most important masterworks of Twombly's oeuvre. Originally conceived for an exhibition at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, France in 2007, these paintings today reside in the world’s most esteemed private and institutional collections, including the Broad Collection in Los Angeles and the Brandhorst Collection in Munich. Across the expansive surface of Untitled, immense scarlet peonies bloom in a flurry of lush pigment and potent gesture, their fluid outlines emitting rich cascades of crimson coloration. Twombly's inspiration for these breathtaking blossoms originated in Japanese art and poetry of the Edo period, and in particular, the haiku poetry of famed seventeenth-century Japanese poets Bashō and Kikako; comprised of six adjoining panels, the format and proportion of the present work further echoes the popular Japanese Edo-period painted folding screens. In Untitled, the importance of the peony within Japanese culture and aesthetic contemplation is fused with influences from French Enlightenment art and architecture, while the painterly exuberance of the bright red blossoms and vigorous expressionistic brushwork set against the pale green ground recalls the rich carnal surfaces of the artist’s own earlier canvases of the 1960s. Articulated on an epic scale, this masterpiece conjures a deeply profound and reflective mode of expression, summarizing the artist's greatest triumphs as he neared the end of his life.
Cy Twombly’s Monumental Blossoms of 2007
Photo © Peter Schälchli
Art © Cy Twombly Foundation
Typical of the greatest works in Twombly’s oeuvre, the floral tableau of Untitled is entrenched within a wealth of symbolic archetypes. While his previous Bacchus series from 2005 seethed with the visceral energies of war, in A Scattering of Blossoms, war cedes to flowers, for which the hero of the famous haiku disarms himself. Peonies are the favored flowers of Japanese aesthetic contemplation, appearing frequently in illustrations, folding screens, and haikus of the Edo period. Once in bloom, their blossoms offer a rush of color and texture, albeit for only a short period; here, that fragile headiness is captured and memorialized on canvas. Noting that Twombly’s inspiration for the series came from haikus by the famous seventeenth-century Japanese masters Bashō and Kikaku, the viewer is reminded of the human implications that these full-blown, elegiac paintings hold for an artist in the later stages of his life and career. This suggestion is underlined by the classical associations denoted by peonies. In the Greek mythological tradition, upon which Twombly has drawn heavily throughout his career, the peony was named after Paeon, a pupil of Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing. Asclepius, feeling that his student had come to surpass the master, attempted to kill Paeon; in order to save him, Zeus turned Paeon into a peony. The flower’s melancholy beauty, so eloquently mythologized by the ancient Greek legend, is likewise keenly felt in Twombly’s Untitled.
''A Scattering of Blossoms' was conceived with a particular range of architectural referents in mind - panneaux, trumeaux, cartouches, portal panels, and such like - pictorial formats conventional to the decor of the hôtel particulier, the typical eighteenth-century town house, in this case the Hôtel de Caumont...: balanced order, symmetrical wings, a centering pedimented temple front preceded by a walled courtyard. This note of confident decorum is crucial. Above all, Twombly is the artist of the genius loci, the spirit of the place, the painter most stirred by its lingering ghosts and fading tastes.”
Indeed, the overall effect of his half-drawn, half-painted composition is one of melting or dissolving flowers, which seem to be flourishing and withering at the same time. Across the broad minty celadon ground, ideogrammatic blossoms of vivid crayon and viscous pigment proliferate; the rosettes float or fall through space, some cut by the edges of the canvas, suggesting their infinite continuation. Meanwhile, in place of stems are copious drips and efflorescent flows of vivid crimson, layered downward trails of paint that wash the panels in verticals as if attempting to tether the buoyant flowers to the foreground, at the same time suggesting their disintegration and transient nature. This duality between fecundity and decay is heightened by the resemblance to Twombly’s previous series of Bacchus paintings. The looping, dripping red paint in the present work is a demonstrable development from the scarlet lasso-loops of those 2005 canvases, their namesake offering an evocative association with both pleasure and pain, reason and madness, tragedy and ecstasy. Such simultaneous expressions of frenzied rising and falling recur throughout Twombly’s career, and, in these later works, are exploded onto an epic monumental scale.
In their vast scale, multi-panel format, and lush floral motifs, the six paintings which form A Scattering of Blossoms attest to the inspiration Twombly drew from eighteenth century French decor and aesthetics—in particular, that of the Hôtel de Caumont, which houses the Collection Lambert—when embarking upon this cycle. In his introduction for the 2007 exhibition, scholar Robert Pincus-Witten describes the importance of that location to the overall concept of the group, reflecting, "A Scattering of Blossoms was conceived with a particular range of architectural referents in mind—panneaux, trumeaux, cartouches, portal panels, and such like—pictorial formats conventional to the decor of the hôtel particulier, the typical eighteenth-century town house, in this case the Hôtel de Caumont...: balanced order, symmetrical wings, a centering pedimented temple front preceded by a walled courtyard. This note of confident decorum is crucial. Above all, Twombly is the artist of the genius loci, the spirit of the place, the painter most stirred by its lingering ghosts and fading tastes." (Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Cy Twombly: Blooming: A Scattering of Blossoms and Other Things, 2007, n.p.) In their expansive surfaces and generous blooms, these paintings speak to the influence of a decadent golden age, summoning images of luxurious garments, gilded interiors and teeming gardens; simultaneously, the freedom of Twombly's gesture suggests an organic liberation from the restraints of any such reference, his riotous blossoms breaking free of neo-classical aesthetics and taste.
“’Due to a certain physicality, or lack of breath from standing, [I] work in ... an impatient way. It has to be done and I take liberties I wouldn’t have taken before. Like in those flower paintings... I got all kinds of wonderful effects that I never achieved before. They all have beautiful passages, such large passages, not like those early paintings.”
The remarkable, billboard-like scale of Untitled is inextricable from the extreme physicality of Twombly’s mature practice, imbuing the work with a palpable sense of the artist behind the brush and how he vigorously ranged across the canvas. The resultant composition, abounding with the pure painterly force of uninhibited muscular execution, represents not only a revisiting but a reinvention of his signature sensual carnality. As Twombly himself explained, “Due to a certain physicality, or lack of breath from standing, [I] work in... an impatient way. It has to be done and I take liberties I wouldn’t have taken before. Like in those flower paintings... I got all kinds of wonderful effects that I never achieved before. They all have beautiful passages, such large passages, not like those early paintings.” (The artist quoted in Nicholas Serota, ed., Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, London, 2008, p. 45)
