Cy Twombly

Lot Description Cy Twombly (1928-2011) Untitled signed, dated and dedicated 'Twombly 1958 Giorgio' (on the reverse) oil-based house paint, colored pencil and graphite on paper mounted on canvas 27½ x 39 3/8 in. (69.8 x 100 cm.) Executed in 1958. Provenance Giorgio Franchetti, Rome Galleria Notizie, Turin Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Turin Corrado Levi, Turin Andrea Ruben Levi, Turin Gagosian Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Literature N. del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2 1956-1960, Munich, 2012, p. 107, no. 89 (illustrated in color). View Lot Notes > Cy Twombly's Untitled from 1958 is a gorgeous illustration of the artist's iconic scribbles, dispersed poetically across the picture plane with a delicate touch. Like so many of Twombly's works, it exudes elegance and beauty, while establishing a complex concurrence of modern abstraction and classical lyricism. This 1958 painting on paper on canvas is a constellation of rhythmic markings that dance across the expansive surface, emerging from and disappearing into a serenely white background. Two tightly woven scribbles hover gracefully in the composition's center. They are enveloped by two larger and unfurled scrawlings, each dissected by a purposeful line. A trio of bold scribbles at the paper's base visually anchors the composition, while on the left side, a scattering of lines precariously approaches its edge. Twombly began living in Rome in 1957, several years after a visit to the city had provoked a momentous fascination within him. Executed during the second year of his stay, Untitled is a key work from a significant era in the artist's life - an era that would continue to impact his style and output for the remainder of his career. During this period, he painted a series of works that materialized from a dramatic convergence of elements: Twombly's innate stylistic predilections, his early artistic foundations and new and crucial environmental influences. Enchanted with the city's rich history and its legacy of classical, medieval and Renaissance masters, Twombly absorbed his surroundings and channeled his interpretations through his own works. His command of pictorial space, as evidenced here in Untitled, was largely shaped by the city's resplendent masterpieces that Twombly observed and studied with avidity. "For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)." (Twombly, quoted in R. Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, London, 2005, p. 98). In some works from this period, words such as "Arcadia" and "Olympia" emerge clearly from the picture plane, serving as direct citations of these influences. In others, as in Untitled, decipherability hovers on the edge of legibility. These works merge Twombly's own notion of cryptographic script with his Roman surroundings, where an aggregation of palimpsest-like scratches and scrawls of graffiti decorate the city's walls and monuments, contributed by a collective of Romans spanning thousands of years. Untitled is one of the most evocative works from this period, an apogee of the influences that came together to shape Twombly's career and a rare example from this period to come to the market. These scribbles are neither products of Surrealist automatism, nor are they predetermined markings of graffiti. They are as organized as they are impetuous, as judicious as they are instinctive, a cooperation between self-conscious and unconscious states of mind. Untitled is a demonstration of the restraint Twombly maintains as his hand traverses the surface, teetering somewhere between control and spontaneity. "It is the forming of the image, the compulsive action of becoming, the direct and indirect pressures brought to a climax in the acute act of forming" that is central to the way he paints. (C. Twombly, Documenti, op. cit., p. 32).

LOT 110 CY TWOMBLY 1928 - 2011 UNTITLED signed and dated June 71 on the reverse housepaint and wax crayon on card 20 1/2 by 14 3/8 in. 52.1 by 36.5 cm. Executed in 1971, this work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné of Cy Twombly Drawings being prepared by Nicola Del Roscio.

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) Untitled (Rome) signed with initials and numbered 'C.T. 5/6' (on the base) bronze 76¼ x 12 1/8 x 31 in. (193.6 x 30.7 x 78.7 cm.) Executed in 1987. This work is number five from an edition of six. Gagosian Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1997 Property of a Private Midwestern Collection N. Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly: A Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture, Vol. I 1946-1997, Munich, 1997, pp. 212-213, no. 97 (another example illustrated in color) K. Schmidt, Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur The Sculpture, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 2000, p. 2 (illustrated in color). New York, Gagosian Gallery, Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures, November-December 1997, pp. 30-31, no. 2 (illustrated). No artist of the twentieth century has dramatized the line per se--the range of its expressiveness and force--as has Cy Twombly. Marking space with grace and elegance, in Untitled (Rome), 1987, the line metamorphoses from physical trace into material form in a transgressive reimagining of one visual language into another, of flattened mark into spatial volume, a translation that is foundational for Twombly's approach to art. Emerging from a double plinth of stacked rectangular forms, a single plant, the poppy pod, rises several feet from its foundation--originally a sand-and-plaster mixture that in its delicate incline suggestively mirrors the spatial angle created by two vertical slender supports. The gentle curve of the single stem evokes a lithe slenderness, the sense of being suspended in space in kinetic tension between fragility and forcefulness, stasis and dynamism. Monumentality and volumetric meagerness are coupled in tension, as are anthropomorphic and vegetal traits. While quite literally a cast plant, a dried and preserved seedpod on its stem, the slight incline, the gentle bow over the stalk affixed to the vertical wooden upright, suggests a head bent forward on its neck and torso, carried forward on striding legs, a highly stylized human form, captured in mid stride. The formal parallel with Alberto Giacometti's equally attenuated vertical striding form, his celebrated Walking Man I, 1960, cannot go unmentioned. Cast in bronze and supported on a rectangular plinth, Giacometti animates his iconic human figure with a richly worked surface, reflecting the forward energy with which it seems to move through space. An artist Twombly deeply admired, Untitled (Rome) might almost represent the abstracted inverse of Giacometti's achievement. But while formally a surrogate for the earlier work--both artists are concerned with essential forms and their relationship to surrounding space--Twombly's concerns are less in hewing out or building up dynamic forms than in combining disparate elements to convey a single unified statement. Twombly's expressive and formal vocabulary derives from the synthesis of natural forms and their relation to line, surface, and volume. The delicate balance of several elements--upright to diagonal, open stance to vertical rise, straight to bent, rounded to crooked--create an elegance and stillness that is breathtaking. A classic demonstration of elemental relationships, Twombly's schematic form conveys a sense of motion within stasis, arrested animation proscribed by the confines of the double plinth, which can be associated to ancient Egyptian burial figures or Greek Korai in their uncompromising verticality and their constriction of affect. Further, the stalk and its upright support, exquisitely graceful in its rise, are kept stationary in the "earthen" mound of its foundation. Cast in bronze, a material canonical in the history of Western sculpture, Untitled (Rome), is mimetic of the form found in nature, expressive of its vernal energy, and rawly tactile. Its spatial rhythm, the soft curve of its gravitational incline is counterbalanced by the vertical thrust of the support. Prior to casting in bronze, the base consisted of roughened plaster over a two-tired wood (or cardboard box), and scrap lumber plinths, materials used by Twombly in many of his sculptures during this period. These three-dimensional assemblages from scavenged materials are unified through the white overpainting. Made initially for the artist's private pleasure, such three-dimensional works have the feel of improvisation, a bricolage of fragments at hand improvised into a unified form. Several sculptures, from the 1950s to the spate of works in the 1980s share with Untitled (Rome), 1987, a radically abstracted association with the human figure--an upright support against which a leaning element reclines at a diagonal (cf.Untitled, Bassano in Teverina,1980 and several from 1983)--as well as a preoccupation with linearity and assertive verticality, where with simplicity and clarity, tall, slender vertical stems rise from their bases to an elevation of five to six feet. Created from found objects, anecdotally selected from what might be considered banal materials, the wood plinths might have been scattered outside his home in Italy, the dried plant scavenged from an outdoor market. But by bringing these materials into aesthetic unity through overpainting and casting, Twombly aesthetizes detritus, and in the process ennobles it. Botanical elements can be found consistently throughout Twombly's oeuvre, their associations rich in meaning for an artist who immersed himself in his immediate natural surroundings. The motif of the flower emerging from an obdurate worked mass, a motif Twombly turned to again and again, suggest his abiding interest in the ephemeral flower form with its raft of classical associations--from the universal cycle of death and renewal to specific references to ancient narratives. Twombly would have been fully aware of such resonances in his use of a vast variety of plants from lotus flowers to roses and palms, as well as poppies. Cultivated throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, the poppy plant was the attribute of the divinities Hypnos (Sleep), Nyx (Night), and Thanatos (Death). The deity Demeter ingested poppy seeds to induce sleep in an effort to forget the loss of her daughter Persephone to Pluto, while in Ovid's Metamorphoses, poppies were caused to bloom from the blood of the dying Adonis. Portrayed in jewelry, tombstones, and bas-reliefs, the poppy was also used in the making of opium, a drug recorded since ancient times. In their rough physicality, organic relationships, and recontextualization of found materials, Twombly renews sculptural vocabulary even as his works register their indebtedness to the history of three-dimensional formations. Manifesting a tie to the worn, the abject, Untitled (Rome), 1987, nevertheless pulsates with the vitality that comes from the expressive qualities that inhere in subtle spatial relations. Enlivened by the formal concentration of discrete elements, their disposition also reveals form in negative space. The emphatic open triangle created between upright and diagonal forms calls up associations within Twombly's oeuvre to the pyramidal shapes, which he associated with confrontational aggressiveness, for example the "A" shape in his drawings and painted cycles that refer to Achilles' vengeance on Hector for the death of Patroclus, by which Twombly implies, "phallic aggression-- more like a rocket... a very definite male thrust" (C. Twombly, "Interview with David Sylvester, 2000," in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2001). Barnett Newman's, Here I, 1950, prefigures this thrust in an early formation, which also rises from a mottled foundation set on a rectangular plinth, forcefully proclaiming both its presence and identity. But here again, the formal similarities belie the present work's complexity of affect and subtleties inhering in its spatial disposition of linear elements. Twombly plays with the notion of transformation, of the metamorphosis of two-dimensional line into its three-dimensional counterpart and the monumental and heroic into their inverse, the attenuated and reticent. This sculpture, in its towing elegance, is also a paradoxical reimagining of the monument per se, refigured as diffident, graceful, and still. Both rigorous and anecdotal, Twombly's full power as an artist of the unheroic yet poignant, the humorous yet whimsical, nonetheless, addresses the spiritual and emotional questions that drive every visual discourse of representation. As Kirk Varnedoe affirms "[Twombly's art, like all progressive art is]...the complete expression of one's own personality through every faculty available and [of] the irrational poetry latent in society's most humble materials." Untitled (Rome), 1987, redefines the syntax for the sculptural language of line, volume, and space to achieve through its monumental, yet lithe form a floral surrogate for renewal and rebirth both in art and life.

LOT 344A PROPERTY FROM A CORPORATE COLLECTION CY TWOMBLY B.1928 ROMAN NOTES II (B. 22) Offset lithograph printed in colors, 1970, signed in pencil on the verso, dated and numbered 16/100, published by Neuendorf Verlag, Hamburg, on heavy wove paper, framed sheet 868 by 700 mm 34 1/8 by 27 5/8 in

&#945 10. Cy Twombly (Lexington, 1928 � Roma, 2011) - Galleria La Tartaruga, 1967 stampa offset a colori, cm 100 x 70 (sc) Manifesto per l�esposizione: Cy Twombly - galleria La Tartaruga, Roma - aprile 1967 Firma e data nella lastra in basso a destra lievi danni CY TWOMBLY, LA TARTARUGA ART GALLERY, OFFSET COLOURED PRINT, CM 100 X 70 (UNFRAMED) SIGNED AND DATED IN THE PLATE