Cy Twombly

Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Harold Diamond, New York (acquired by 1977)
Acquavella Contemporary Art, New York
The Lone Star Foundation, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in January 1978)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in August 1980

Nicola Del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings, Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2: 1956-1960, Munich, 2012, cat. no. 206, p. 248, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light handling to the edges, and the bottom left corner of the sheet has minor creases. There are scattered graphite smudges that appear to be by the artist's hand and inherent to the artist's working method. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte, intermittently along the top and side edges. Framed under Plexiglas. *Please note the auction begins at 9:30 am on November 14th.*
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

 The art of Cy Twombly has always evaded ready categorization. Initially forged during the era of Abstract Expressionist hegemony, when the protagonists of the New York School created an authoritatively independent American artistic identity, Twombly broke new territory through a remarkable outpouring of visceral aesthetic energy, serene compositional economy, and pure graphic intelligence. Urgent, haptic mark-making together with graphic and textural drama have become synonymous with Twombly’s inimitable oeuvre. His compositions propose an unremittingly free association between painting, symbols and language, forming a distinctly lyrical mode of abstraction and can be understood as an archetype of sublime visual poetry. With the unbridled rawness of a graffiti dialect that veers between the legible and illegible, Twombly invented an unknowable pictorial lexicon that continues to afford a deeply subjective experience for each individual spectator. Partially-erased, smeared and overwritten scrawls accumulate like geological strata: mnemonic shadows narrating successive past acts of creation through a contrast between the manipulation of impasto plasticity and the ethereal delicacy of elusive strokes. Across six decades his work seemed almost to have been affected by the natural elements over great passages of time, and ultimately manifested the unadulterated confluence of media and subject. 

Although Twombly consolidated a great plethora of esteemed precedent, from da Vinci to Boccioni, Poussin to Pollock, and Picasso to de Kooning, his output can be as readily traced to singular influences as it can be apportioned to one defined thought or emotion. Not only did his inspirations range from the tactile to the ephemeral, from the sounds of the sea to the lines in a poem, but the poetry of his vision lay in the confluence of these sensations, expressions and experiences. He generated works by awaiting a stimulus, sometimes for months at a time and then allowed thoughts and feelings to congeal as intuitive marks: “You can think of one thing when you’re doing and before you get finished you are questioning something else...If you see a painting that’s always coherent from the beginning to the end, it’s something far from the main preoccupations or the character of the person, that’s all. As much as you’d like to get away from yourself, you never do.”

The two-decade period represented by these extraordinary eight works on paper from Dia Art Foundation, in conjunction with six works being offered in the Contemporary Art Evening Sale, spanning 1957 to 1976, was characterized by the cyclical nature of Twombly’s artistic practice, which was endemically intertwined with his biography. Twombly traveled extensively around Italy, North Africa, Spain and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. In New York, while Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns lived in neighboring lofts on Pearl Street, Twombly visited his friends Conrad Marca-Relli and Joseph Cornell on Long Island, where he also met Jackson Pollock a number of times. Pollock is, of course, a defining influence, but also the standard from which Twombly was able to advance. As attested by Nicholas Cullinan, “the graffiti-like scratches, scribbles and frenetic lines that envelop his work from the mid-1950s simultaneously referred to and subverted the then-dominant calligraphic painterly mode of Abstract Expressionism...If Pollock had set the pace for how Twombly’s generation should paint, then Twombly’s rejection of the brush in favour of the pencil liberated him from the former’s drips and splatters. Through them, Twombly was able to move away from the machismo of the stereotypical ‘action painter,’ and to neuter this with indecision, hesitancy and doubt, thus brushing aside the belligerence of Abstract Expressionism.” (Nicholas Cullinan in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern (and travelling), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, 2008-09, p. 58) 

By experimenting with indeterminate iconography Twombly questioned the assumptions of conventional visual vocabularies, frames of reference, and sign systems. Consequently, as the literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes noted, “What happens on the stage Twombly offers us is something which partakes of several kinds of event.” (Roland Barthes in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, 1979, p. 9) Twombly’s pioneering interrogation of the boundaries of semiotics and signifier-referent equations, continually enticing the viewer with implied meaning and challenging the deductions inherent to visual recognition, fluctuated throughout the course of his career. However, as Pierre Restany once described, Twombly’s paintings are “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) Despite a residual yearning to decipher his stuttering marks, numbers, fluttering forms and explosive scribbles, Twombly’s visual language has neither syntax nor logic: ultimately it is comprised of “furtive gestures, an écriture automatique,” (Ibid.) and functions as a compulsory sensual and intellectual catharsis that is both universal and particular to the individual.