Cy Twombly

Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private Collection, U.S.A. (acquired directly from the above)

Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1961-1965, Munich 1993, no. 135, p. 205, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the green tones are deeper and richer in the original. This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals very minor craquelure to the thickest area of the green impasto towards the centre and to the circular dark green element. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a number of minute spots of retouching in places to the impasto paint surfaces.
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Ides of March is an extraordinary example of Cy Twombly's cycle of paintings, Portraits from History, which the artist began in 1962 by using square-format canvases and depicting "frontal, iconic presentation of prominent, closely massed imagery." (Kirk Varnedoe cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1994-95, p. 37). With this new body of works Twombly abandoned the previous aesthetic of a dispersed narrative in favour of rectangular monumental elements centrally dominating empty spaces. Fervidly painted by hand with thick green impasto, and featuring the distinctive central spatial axis that Twombly employed in his renowned painting School of Athens from the same year as the present work, which was inspired by Rafael's Stanze della Segnatura in the Vatican, Ides of March epitomises Twombly's signature style of painterly abstraction and his fascination with classical history and mythology.

Cy Twombly first moved to Rome in 1957. His sojourn soon became permanent and an incessant source of inspiration for the next five decades. At a time when most American artists of his generation were turning to contemporary popular culture for inspiration, Twombly immersed himself in the most traditional sources of Western art: Greek and Roman antiquity. In Rome, Twombly became enraptured by majestic panoramas, classical landscapes and love cycles of the High Renaissance and developed a highly personal, cryptic style of poetic 'handwriting' that was permeated with the grandeur and decadence of the Mediterranean world. Twombly's graphic language is poetry and reporting, "furtive gesture and écriture automatique, sexual catharsis and both affirmation and negation of the self. 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) 

Twombly revisited the classical world through painting with sensual immediacy. The spontaneous vitality of his hand and wrist alchemically transformed experience and mythical imagination into an intuitive matrix of illusive signs and ambiguous forms; disparate landmarks on a voyage of self-discovery. Fluctuating between the corporeal and the ethereal, Twombly's expressive syntax of forms, scraps of words and elusive metaphorical signs amounts to a semiotic avowal of the soul. As observed by Heiner Bastian, "the extent to which Twombly appeals to myths is noteworthy; it is, as it were, his striving to reach a kind of literally physical communication with the corporeal – a treat to be seen in the paintings." (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly, Catalogue Raissone'of the Paintings Volume I, Munich 1993, p. 29). On Twombly's interpretation of Classical mythology Roland Barthes, the artist's closest critic, reminds that the carefully chosen titles should not induce the viewer to a forced analogy and search of descriptive meaning outside the title itself.  On this matter, Rosalind Krauss further stresses how Twombly's intent is spectacularly performative: "I mark you, I name you, I call you painting." (Rosalind Krauss, 'Cy was Here; Cy's Up', Artforum International, vol.33, no.1, September 1994, p.118)

Executed in the same year of Death of Giuliano de Medici, which now resides in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Ides of March stands within the cycle Portraits of History for its candour and ethereal nature ruptured by the unique ardour of Twombly's freely gesture.