Cy Twombly

"Every line is thus the actual experience with its unique story. It does not illustrate; it is the perception of its own realization." Cy Twombly in 1957.

With its spontaneous cosmos of floating lines and symbolic autobiographical marks, the present work is a superlative example of Twombly’s lyrical voice at the beginning of the 1960s - the period regarded by many as the creative zenith of his career. This masterful evocation of space and light resound with joyous graphic energy from within Epitaph's vibrant symphony of graceful arcs and broken geometric forms.

The dreamlike traces of the artist’s hand weave across the neutral cream canvas and fuse into a complex web of tender marks and bold deliberate strokes. Reading like a mental landscape or graphic poem, elegant fleshy oil tones jostle with delicate pencil streaks and bright crayon swirls, abounding into a compositional whirlpool of frenetic, calligraphic accents that draw the viewer deeper into the organic totality of the composition.

Importantly it was Twombly’s move to Rome in 1957 that exerted the greatest influence upon his work and creative vision. The Eternal City's distinctive light and atmosphere, its culture and living sense of architectonic and pictorial continuity all combind to provide the perfect locale for the development of Twombly's own poetic sensibilities. 

Epitaph teems with the artist’s distinctive repertoire of cloud-like bursts, architectonic structures, fluttering hearts and ambivalent biomorphic signs, that seem at once introspective, poetic and sublime. “These are parts of a general practice by which Twombly juxtaposes motifs of the irregular, organic and institutional with marks connoting the systematic, unyielding and cerebral. Such oppositions are basic to his work before and after, but in 1960, the pairings seem more premeditated and self-consciously analytic.” (Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1994, p. 34)

As blues, reds, pinks and greens burst forward from the cool flatness of the picture plane, the concentrated outpouring of colour  is animated by fluid drips of creamy white paint that ebb and flow with an intuitive choreography. As Heiner Bastian notes in his Catalogue Raisonné of Twombly’s paintings, “Everything that happens in [Twombly’s] paintings is as fragile and reticent as the experience of poetry and their evanescent materiality is inscribed with a correspondingly appropriate fleetness and elusiveness.” (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Vol. II 1961-65, Munich 1993, p. 22)

The meandering fluidity of Twombly’s weaving line as it darts its way across the canvas affords Epitaph an overall sense of balance and graphic clarity. His unique language of simplified gestures and forms allude to a higher state of being, one that transcends the boundless realm of pictorial materiality to sit within the elevated narrative of the grand classical tradition.


The passionately scrawled poetry in the upper left corner affords a rarefied glimpse into the painting’s intimate narrative realm. Inscribed like airy whispers caught on a passing breeze, Twombly reveals the painting’s title along with the lines, “like the hyacinth in the hills which the shepherds step on, trampling in the ground of the flower in its purple…cutting their lovely hair, laid it upon her tomb.” As evasive as they are suggestive, these lyrical verses dwell in the tangibility of experience and the nostalgia of remembrance.