Galleria Sperone, Rome
Angelo Baldassarre, Bari
Private Collection, Europe, acquired from the above.

Yvon Lambert (ed.), Cy Twombly: Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier de Cy Twombly, Milan, 1979, Vol VI, p. 184, no. 202 (illustrated).
Nicola del Roscio (ed.), Cy Twombly Drawings, Milan, 2016, Vol VI, p. 188, no. 198 (illustrated).

Over the course of half a century, Cy Twombly forged an utterly innovative painterly language, aiming to create a new mode of expression which looked to the ancient past for inspiration whilst providing an utterly modern interpretation of classical myth and legend: an interpretation that arose out of a time when pure mimesis within painting had lost its value. Twombly pioneered a highly abstracted painterly dialectic in which the relationship between signification and symbol was dissected and broken down, and in which the elemental materials of painting itself were deconstructed and re-formed. Annie Cohen-Solal has discussed the highly distinct nature of the artist’s oeuvre, stating that: “The work of Cy Twombly eludes art historian’s traditional categories” (A. Cohen-Solal, ‘The Multiple Territories of Cy Twombly’ in Cy Twombly, Works from the Sonnabend Collection, (exh. cat.) London, 2012, p. 5).

Made up of an exquisitely formed collage of card, graphite, oil paint and pastel, Untitled combines elements of Twombly’s highly distinctive painterly language with the delicacy of a work on paper to superb effect. Ever the draughtsman, Twombly elevated drawing to the status of painting: the graphic gestures evolved from an expressive line to the presence of actual words embedded in the composition. Within Untitled the tri-partite arrangement of the paper is almost architectural in form, imbuing the collage with an intriguing suggestion of three-dimensionality. Verdant green contrasts with soft grey in Twombly’s trademark loops, contained within the bands of overlaid card.

In 1976, when he created the present work, Untitled, Cy Twombly had been living in Rome, the city which had been his home sine 1957. Previously in New York, however, he had been submersed in an art world that revered Abstract Expressionism, and Twombly was inspired by the idea of an intuitive art, explaining: ‘It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it’s like coming through the nervous system. It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening’ (C. Twombly in an interview with D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2001, p. 179). Encouraged by Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly attended courses at Black Mountain College, where he probed the relationship between text and image by exploiting the potential of handwriting as a painterly form. Only on his move to Rome, however, did Twombly’s visual language truly come together, filtering the history, land, and myths of the Mediterranean within a sensuous and exuberant landscape of line. The following decade was one of abundant energy and prolific output, pinpointing the beginning of a ‘transgressive Twombly’, incorporating both his eroticised imagery as well as the savagery of his mark making, which continued throughout his career (R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 266).