Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly settled in Rome in 1957 and the effect the city had – its culture, urban and rural landscape and atmosphere and light – was profound on the artist’s work. This, coupled with Twombly’s self-imposed exile from New York, resulted in a uniquely lyrical approach to mark making that has been celebrated the world over. The present work, Untitled (Rome), was executed in 1961, a point in time many consider to be a zenith in Twombly’s celebrated career. It is illustrated here, in color, for the very first time, and comes from a private European collection. Its previous whereabouts were unknown according to Heiner Bastian’s catalogue raissoné of Twombly’s paintings.

The end of the 1950’s saw Twombly’s paintings resound with the most delicate and vulnerable graphology. Any sense of ‘action’ imbued in his almost fragile delineation carried the same psychological and aesthetic properties as those buried in the automatist drawings of the Surrealists. Soft, gentle lines fluttered across waves of cream, beige or gray grounds, serving to electrify, in the most discrete fashion, the neutral ‘space’ of Twombly’s canvas. This tender and tenacious treatment of line served Twombly’s overall compositional flux, manifested as a web-like mesh that captured a series of personal thoughts and memories. As such, these canvases became vehicles of autobiography; visualizing the artist’s own experiences –real and dreamlike- in the fluctuations of his sophisticated line and sensitive ground.

The artist’s style was one that revolved around the nature and use of this spontaneous line, incised into the oil surface using various methods and tools. These earlier works reveal a dense, often heavily-layered surface that is packed with a frenetic matrix of marks, spiraling around the canvas like a compositional whirlpool, drawing the viewer in and out of subjective ‘spaces’ that, in essence, remind one of Pollock’s enterprise. His move to Rome immediately saw a substantial shift take place in terms of the density of the mark, as well as the lyricism and ‘totality’ of the composition. The surface was now lighter, with less paint; the marks were much more calligraphic (he would often configure letters, words, fleeting images or numbers); the composition was less organic and more dispersed, appearing more random, like a wall of graffiti. This emphasis on using recognizable letters or numbers, ironically born from the anonymity of graffiti, as opposed to the autographic gestures of action painters such as Pollock and de Kooning, underscores the artist’s difference from the Abstract Expressionist School, and confirms the unique status of his creative vision.

Untitled (Rome) is a stunning and ethereal example of Twombly’s lyrical voice at the beginning of the 1960’s. Here, he has found his mature voice, so that the sense of movement, inherent to the juxtaposition of fleshy oil paint with the fluttering of his pencil and crayon, is majestic. Forms seem to surge into one another, notably the great wave of graphite to the left commingling with the central ‘cloud’ motif. This motion is counterbalanced by interlocking forms of graphite and oil paint that fizz out of the pictorial space, affording an omni directional energy to the composition. The canvas resounds with a joyous symphony of arcs, organic forms and broken geometry that may be read as hills, valleys or windows. His floating lines, in their very execution, suggest the ‘fleeting’ or ‘momentary’ capture of part of the landscape, both physical and metaphysical. The artist’s line is here experimental rather than assertive: there is more of John Cage’s music in Untitled (Rome) than there is Pollock’s self-actualized gestures. The layers of meaning in the painting, too, carry an intellectual weight that few artists’ works can match. A cosmos of marks and meanings seem to commingle together that lends the work an intellectual elasticity as much as they engender a jewel-like, precious surface. It is very difficult to assert any sense of ‘closure’ on the painting, and this, of course, may be connected to the fact that Twombly’s work is firmly placed within the grand narrative of the classical tradition. Here, he diminishes rather than enhances any sense of individuality, subsuming that into the collective and much larger history of Western culture. Untitled (Rome) is a celebration, an embrace of that culture, rather than a search for any meaning of identity.

Despite the various meanings one can extract from Twombly’s intelligent Arcadia of works, here, one is left with a dynamic and delightful example of the artist’s painting. It is a wonderful marriage of meandering line and brush, effortless marks with great splurges of paint. The entire whole is beautifully weighted and presented into a harmony of jewel-like forms. It is a visual feast that, in the final analysis, does not urge its viewer to be too analytical or exegetical. One can delight in the florid, romantic and ornate landscape of his imagination Twombly sets before us.