Cy Twombly

Galerie Bonnier, Geneva
Galerie Folker Skulima, Berlin
Acquired by the present owner from the above circa 1970

Geneva, Galerie Bonnier, Cy Twombly. Peintures, dessins, lithographies, 1970, no. 1 (incorrectly titled Flora)

Heiner Bastian, Ed., Cy Twombly, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1961-1965, Berlin 1993, p. 104, no. 44, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The reds tend more towards pink and the white background is creamier and warmer overall in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to convey the rich textural variety and the impasto areas of paint in the heart and to the centre right of the canvas. Condition: This work is in good condition. There are two very light creases towards the lower left corner. There are networks of cracks to the areas of impasto, which have been stabilised. There is a small paint loss to the thin line of impasto extending from the bottom of the heart, and another to a line of impasto below and to the right of the heart. Examined under ultra-violet light, there are several spots of inpainting towards the top and bottom left corners and evidence of stablization to the cracks in the thicker areas of impasto.
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Executed almost half a century ago, Cy Twombly's sensational Untitled (Rome) engages the viewer with an energy that is both desperately urgent and utterly irresistible. It marks the inception of the 1961-65 period when "everything about the paintings", according to Heiner Bastian, "sets them apart from the larger body of artistic theory of the latter half of [the twentieth-] century" (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, volume II, 1961-1965, Mosel 1993, p.21). It is seminal to Twombly's renowned canon of Rome paintings, initiated when he moved there permanently in 1957, but which were to find fuller, more mature expression only by the time of the present work. Living abroad allowed Twombly to experience sensual release and exist beyond the constraints of familiar contexts. This is evidenced by the present work where the exuberant and lyrical mark-making embodies the artist's infatuation with the Antique, Renaissance and Baroque majesty of his new Italian environment, which was so far removed from the Lower Manhattan loft life he had walked away from. At the same time, these marks broadcast an intellectual rigour and intensity that critically elevates Untitled (Rome) apart from much of his contemporaneous output as one of the best examples of the cycle.

 

Twombly's staggering innovation and inimitable abstract aesthetic are on full display here through the work's visceral imagery, serene compositional economy, and graphic intelligence. Most immediately striking is the painting's intuitive design, which is at once so instinctive and seemingly arbitrary, yet also deeply satisfying on a formal level. The balance achieved between the corporeal manipulation of impasto plasticity and the ethereal delicacy of the scraped and scratched primed canvas results in total visual seduction. Indeed, the variegated surface of Untitled (Rome) narrates the rich history of its own creation. Bastian has recounted the corporeality of Twombly's working process: "He smears color on with his fingers or applies it directly from the tube onto the canvas as a physical act: color becomes raw condition" (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Paintings, 1952-1976, Frankfurt/ Main-Berlin 1978, p.43).

 

The present work is also a mesmerising paragon of Twombly's pioneering interrogation of semiotic sign systems and accords strongly with Roland Barthes observation that "What happens on the stage Twombly offers us (whether it is canvas or paper) is something which partakes of several kinds of event" (Roland Barthes in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, 1979, p. 9). Akin with Twombly's best output, Untitled (Rome) mediates the boundary between figuration and abstraction, continually enticing the viewer with implied meaning and challenging the deductions inherent to signifier-referent equations. The catharsis in Untitled (Rome) lies in the apparently central motif of the heart: a symbol that is overloaded with cognitive associations, yet here nothing more than a gathering of scribbled lines. Twombly's disavowal of assumption in this work echoes the maxim of his forerunner, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé: "Everything happens by shortcut...story telling is avoided".

 

Kirk Varnedoe has described that during the period leading up to this painting in 1960, Twombly was very anxious that his mark making may have been becoming decorative. Indeed, despite striving for "a wilfully uningratiating originality...the risk of a mannerism...the devil of virtuosity...the sparse linearity could, if unpressured, err into vitiating elegance" (Kirk Varnedoe in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1995, p.34). As a reaction against this perceived tendency, in 1961 Twombly obliterated these traits completely and created paintings that are, according to Varnedoe, "among the most impressive, most emotionally wrought work's of Twombly's career...They reach for a higher level of lyricism, and a greater grandiloquence, precisely through their more aggressive release of explicitly defiling messiness" (Ibid. p. 34). The scattering of haptic marks in Untitled (Rome) exactly signposts this release and comprises the most completely realised instance of Twombly's self-abandonment to the unadulterated powers of his creation.

 

In early 1960 Twombly and his family had moved into a grand new home in a seventeenth-century Palazzo on the via di Monserrato in Rome. However, in 1961 Twombly moved his studio out of that building and into rented rooms on the piazza del Biscione. The streets around his home were impoverished with petty crime while his studio was not only next to the bustling open-air food market of Campo dei Fiori and above a cheap cinema, but also in the heart of the red light district. Hence Twombly's journey to and from his workplace ran the full gamut not only of antiquarian cultural splendour, but also the colourful sights and smells of the living city. Untitled (Rome) does not merely evoke the sentimental idea of metropolitan opulence, but actively conflates the spirits of both past and present in one pictorial experience.

 

In the same year as Untitled (Rome) was executed, Pierre Restany discussed Twombly's paintings "As full of ambiguity as life itself...Twombly's 'writing' has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life, its murmuring penetrating to the very depths of things" (Pierre Restany, The Revolution of the Sign, 1961). Ultimately the mark-making of Untitled (Rome) stands as the fully evolved incarnation of the chaotic and disjointed nature of existence itself. In discussing the "cultural grandeur" and "bodily physicality" characteristic of this series, Varnedoe declares that Twombly's painting "wants exactly to convey a sense of life energy that yokes these exalted and debased domains together and makes their energies indivisible" (Kirk Varnedoe, Op. Cit., p.34-5). As the Eternal City and epicentre of endless legendary mythologies, Rome is the city chosen by Twombly as his home and as titled for this painting. As such, this work is an affirmation of the disordered vitality that runs down through the ages and binds together the histories of human experience.