Cy Twombly

Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1982

Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Cy Twombly, 1982

Art Press, Paris, No. 65, December 1982, p. 50, illustrated

Yvon Lambert, Catalogue Raisonné des Oeuvres sur Papier de Cy Twombly, Volume VII 1977-1982, Milan 1991, p. 185, no. 203, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in several places. Very close inspection reveals two very small areas of impasto that have been slightly compressed, one towards the bottom right corner and another approximately 10 centimetres below the H of Niphidia.
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Lycian Drawing (Niphidia) is a masterful example of how one of the most acclaimed post-war artists realigned the narrative of American modernism and successfully embraced Europe’s classical heritage. In a delicate balancing act, Cy Twombly investigates the gap between the written word, the painted image and the imagined past.  Executed in the summer months of 1982, Lycian Drawing (Niphidia) belongs to a series of similarly large works on paper painted by Twombly in Bassano, a small picturesque village amidst the rolling landscape North of Rome. In a land whose present topography and architecture are still fully saturated with the past, Twombly’s art acts as a conduit through which the voices of antiquity echo without losing the artist’s own in the process.

Among the works produced during this period, namely the Naxos, Suma, and Lycian drawings, this particular example stands out for its striking painterly features. On first sight, the composition of Lycian Drawing is deceptively straightforward: it combines Twombly’s familiar format of image and text, a title (Lycian), a proper name (Niphidia), the artist’s initials and two dates (AUG 22 82, SEPT. 19 82), placed above a thickly painted composition (Jon Bird, ‘Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the work of Cy Twombly’, Oxford Art Journal, no. 30.3, 2007, p. 499). The poetry and depth of this image is only apparent to the inquiring eye that sees the smudge on the lower area slowly unfolding. The painting is that of a roughly drawn expanding series of circles. Its dynamic flow of thickly applied layers of oil stick and oil paint follows a concentric motion that outruns the picture plane. As the artist stated in 1957, a pictorial gesture such as this “does not illustrate – it is a sensation of its own realization” (James Lawrence, ‘Cy Twombly’s Cryptic Nature’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Eykyn Maclean, Cy Twombly: Works from the Sonnabend Collection, 2012, p. 17). This sensation, as Roland Barthes suggests, might ultimately be the only thing we are able to see in Twombly’s work (Roland Barthes, ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’ in: Nicola del Roscio, Ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich 2002, pp. 88-101).

The heuristic solution Twombly finds to remedy the inaccessibility of his imagery is that of providing written references to literature and myths, places and times. From the mid-1950s onwards the graphic dimension of text becomes a constant of Twombly’s work. The irrational is hence joined, rather than replaced, by the rational. With capital red letters in the halting and child like character of his writing (the A for example is replaced by a triangle, perhaps a nod to ancient typography), Twombly provides his work on paper with the cultural reference Lycian. Alluding to the Anatolian region of Lycium, an ancient civilisation renowned for its democratic government and cultural independence, the artist leaves us with facts cut loose from their original context. This decontextualisation negates narrative fixity, which in turn unlocks inexhaustible visual potential in Twombly’s work (Ibid.). In fact it is precisely by introducing these signifiers that the artist’s creative impetus is directed. In his words, it is “usually a place or a literary reference or an event that took place, [that] start[s] me off. To give me a clarity of energy” (Ibid.).

Overall Lycian Drawing (Niphidia) suggests a battle between the untouched paper surface, the tumult of painterly gesture and the graphic index of Twombly’s use of text. One is ultimately witness to the intimate struggle that the American artist is having with his own internalised stimulations: steeped in a lexicon of ancient myth yet fluent in abstract expressionist gesture, Twombly is somewhat removed from the concerns of his American counterparts. Through his smudges and slabs Twombly comes to terms with the very truth of painting. Never before was the instinctive connection between an artist’s mind and his hand as immediate as with Cy Twombly and the Lycian Drawing (Niphidia).