Cy Twombly

Stable Gallery, New York
Collection of Eleanor Ward, New York
The Pace Gallery, New York
Peder Bonnier, New York
Private Collection, Belgium
Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2001

Nicola del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné Volume I: 1951-1955, Munich 2011, p. 173, no. 115, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in the top two corners. Extremely close inspection reveals three extremely light spots of adhesive residue along the upper edge.
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Untitled is an outstanding example of the eloquent visual poetry that Cy Twombly would explore throughout his influential career. Composed of purely linear constellations that suggest an urgent and expressive mark-making, Untitled is simultaneously evocative of a classicism that is poised in the artist’s confident handling of the pencil. The dramatic dynamism of the composition, in which strong vertical lines dominate the lyrical drawing, is characteristic of Twombly’s original artistic theorem, formulated at a time when Abstract Expressionism had become the universal language of American art.

Although Twombly had previously explored the gestural aesthetic of the abstract expressionist painters, he would only explore its radical possibilities as writing during his time in Italy. Executed in 1955, two years before the artist moved to Rome, the present drawing stands as a momentous yet subtle testament to the confidence Twombly had already achieved in his work. The singularity of the line which would come to dominate the drawings and paintings of this period, is masterfully captured here; reduced to a raw, pulsating presence, the pencil lines in Untitled create a graphic drama that is at once evocative of handwritten scribbles and an abstract, expressive composition. As Heiner Bastian observed: “for Twombly, line becomes a poetic metaphor in which idea and form, free from conventional usage, are reconstituted within an unmodulated script” (Heiner Bastian, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume I 1948-1960, Munich 1992, p. 23).

Twombly’s unique synthesis of poetry and drawing, in which writing and gestural mark-making are reconciled into a lyrically abstract language, constitutes a radically new understanding of formal language and signification at a time when these issues were under intense scrutiny. Through their resolution into an elementary formal constellation, the artist goes beyond the confines of either, approximating an interstitial space in which semiotic signifiers become obsolete of meaning and exist as referents only to themselves. As the famous linguist and philosopher Roland Barthes remarked: “from the writing Twombly keeps the gesture… (it) is the indetermined and inexhaustible sum of reasons, impulses, which surround the act with an atmosphere… Twombly produces an effect” (Roland Barthes quoted in: Ibid. pp. 26-27).