Cy Twombly

Galerie Art in Progress, Munich
Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg
Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne
Saatchi Collection, London
Sotheby's, New York, April 30, 1991, Lot 47
Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris (acquired from the above)
Private collection
Phillip's, de Pury and Luxembourg, New York, November 11, 2002, Lot 22
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle and Baden-Baden, Stattliche Kunsthalle, Surrealität - Bildrealität 1924 - 1974. In Den Unzähilgen Bildern Des Lebens, December 1974 - February 1975, cat. no. 366, p. 153, illustrated
Munich, Galerie Art in Progress, Cy Twombly: Grey Paintings and Gouaches, March - April 1975, cat. no. 1, illustrated (upside down)
London, Saatchi Collection, Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, March - October 1985
London, Tate Gallery, Past Present Future: A New Display of the Collection, 1990
Paris, Galerie Karsten Greve, Cy Twombly, Peintures, Oeuvres sur Papier et Sculptures, May - October 1993

Robert Rosenblum, "Cy Twombly", Art of our Time: The Saatchi Collection, New York, 1984, vol. 2, pl. no. 67
Peter Schjeldahl, "Painter's Painter", Interview, July 1993, p. 29, illustrated
Heiner Bastian, ed., Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III, 1966-1971, Munich, 1982, cat. no. 79, pp. 178-179, illustrated

The Bolsena series by Cy Twombly explores a linear style capable of embodying the concept of spatial time within form. Related to his earlier Blackboard, Orion and Veil paintings of the late 1960s, the group is named after the lake in Italy where Twombly spent some time during the summer of 1969, in the Palazzo del Drago, owned by his friend Giovanni del Drago.  The series confirms a dramatic turn in Twombly’s oeuvre that took place in the mid 1960s, when the artist abandoned his highly tactile and seemingly spontaneous style in favor of dark grey grounds and the systemic development of line. This change seems to reflect an awareness of the Minimalist aesthetic – and of the harsh criticism made against his Discourse on Commodus show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1964 as a continuation of the principles of Abstract Expressionism, and consequently hopelessly outdated.

Twombly’s attempt to depict a temporal dimension through the implied movement of forms and lines was influenced by Italian Futurism, and its distorted geometry of curves and bends, and - above all - by Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of nature, which seem to reflect an intuitive and almost neurotic obsession with system, something rationally driven.  The act of drawing a line involves movement by the artist, just as the spectator’s impressions of objects in motion are experienced over time. “Around 1967-1968, Twombly isolated the abstraction of movement, whether at rest or in motion, and its coefficient, space-time… Leonardo, whom Twombly has always admired for his passion and cool intellect, became a guide for rational inquiry… to envision the affinities between natural and human process – to see the drawn line, like a natural phenomenon, unfold in space and time.” (S. Delahunty in Exh. Cat, Institute of Contemporary Art, Cy Twombly,  Philadelphia, 1975, pp. 22-24)

Twombly’s interest in the concept of space and time was also triggered – as the artist explained in an interview with Heiner Bastian - by the Apollo moon landings, which he avidly followed through the television coverage and, by his own admission, influenced the Bolsena paintings.  These grey background paintings - too undisciplined and subjective to be thought Minimalist or Conceptual works, too distanced and impersonal to be seen as inspired by the Abstract Expressionist tenets - establish a utterly original style in which: “Every line is thus the actual experience with its unique story. It does not illustrate; it is the perception of its own realization.” (K. Schmidt in Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Cy Twombly, 1990, p. 11)

Untitled (Bolsena) is constructed on a horizon-like division of a dark and empty space. Twombly has abandoned his sumptuous passages of paint commingled together to form compositions that teem with emotion, in favor of a softer approach to mark making. A sense of rapid movement is expressed with short linear incisions of obscure geometric meaning, whereas the dramatic use of letters and numbers suggest time and space, but at the same time confirm the flatness of the canvas.

The result is a very sophisticated work, in which Twombly’s ability to elevate the most simple compositional device or mark to the most precious and exquisite status instills the basic mechanics of two-dimensional art – painting and drawing – with a sensitivity and finesse that borders on the sublime.