Cy Twombly

Heiner Bastian, Berlin

Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London

Hirschl and Adler Modern, New York

Private Collection, London

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1994

New York, The Stable Gallery, Cy Twombly, 1955 

Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Hamburg, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Stiftung Froehlich: Sammlungsblöcke, 1996-97, p. 184, no. 248, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Gallery, on loan to the collection, 1999

Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst im ZKM Karlsruhe, Eröffnung des Museums für Neue Kunst, 1999-2000

Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst im ZKM Karlsruhe, Just what is it…, 2009-10, p. 168, illustrated in colour

Heiner Bastian, Ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1948-1960, Vol. 1, Munich 1992, p. 86, installation view

Nicola del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1, 1951-1955, Munich 2014, p. 89, no. 35, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is 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 several places and the vertical edges are deckled. Very close inspection reveals a few minute specks of foxing in isolated places. Further inspection reveals a faint horizontal crease towards the top edge.
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Liberated of figurative associations and bursting with nervous, gestural lines that scratch and stutter across the paper, Cy Twombly’s impulsive work Untitled is a pivotal example of his ground-breaking early abstract works from the mid-1950s, which herald later works such as the famed Blackboard series. Freed of ornamental encumbrance, philosophical metaphysics and heroic gesture, the present work challenges the artistic legacy of Abstract Expressionism. In the almost mechanical nature of the ‘automatic’ drawn line, Untitled anticipates the high point of the Minimalist aesthetic that would become the dominant artistic movement some years later. Indeed, Twombly himself affirmed that the drawings from this period established “the direction everything would take from then on” (Heiner Bastian, Ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1961-65, Vol. II, Munich 1993, p. 276). Already displaying his intellectual and artistic maturity, these early decisive works positioned Twombly as one of the leading artistic figures who would come to redefine the canon of art history in the Twentieth Century.

In 1953, Twombly returned from an extensive six-month travel around Europe and North Africa with his friend and companion Robert Rauschenberg. Soon after, he was drafted into the army where he was assigned to the cryptography department as a code breaker. Stationed in Augusta, Georgia, Twombly created and solved encrypted codes by day while using the night hours and weekends to develop his own code, which is so masterfully depicted in the present work. His second solo-show at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1955, which included the present work, was reviewed by one of the leading poets and art aficionados Frank O’Hara. O’Hara aptly and enthusiastically reflects on Twombly’s works: “His new paintings are drawn, scratched and crayoned over and under the surface with as much attention to esthetic tremors as to artistic excitement. Though they are all white with black and grey scoring, the range is far from a whisper, and this new development makes the painting itself the form… If drawing is as vital to painting as color, Twombly has an ever ready resource for his remarkable feelings” (Frank O’Hara, ‘Cy Twombly’, ARTnews, Vol. 53, No. 9, January 1955, p. 46).

The period in which these drawings were made marks an incredibly creative moment in the life of the young Twombly. At the beginning of the decade, he fully immersed himself into the New York cultural scene, absorbing art from all eras and times. It is thus no coincidence that the present work is reminiscent in style of Surrealist 'automatic' drawings. Pioneered and developed by André Masson to express the subconscious, these automatic drawings sought to abolish conscious, pre-planned compositions and pure representation, instead allowing chance and coincidence to define the formation of the drawing. While similar in style, Twombly’s drawings are concerned less with yielding 'unconscious' imagery; rather, his disengaged lines seem to aimlessly emanate without beginning or end, purposefully negating any skill in draughtsmanship. Twombly's aim to unlearn any preconceived conventions and habits to quite literally start at the very beginning culminates in pure, untutored marks of expression that announce a fresh approach to art. Conceptually ambitious, the works are also lyrical and beautiful, suffused with an elegance that points to certain modern predecessors ranging from Alberto Giacometti to Jean Dubuffet and Arshile Gorky. Twombly admired Gorky for his bold approach to art, a feeling that was reinforced by seeing his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1951. Indeed, the wild and bustling strokes of Gorky echo Twombly’s own confident line in the present work.

In its radical yet intimate approach to drawing Untitled elicits the ethereal delicacy of elusive pencil strokes bustling with visual dynamism. The simultaneous expressiveness of both emptiness and fullness transforms the present work into a primal display of Twombly’s unbridled passion for drawing, a medium that has pervaded his long and illustrious career.