Lot Essay
Completed in Rome in 1967, Letter of Resignation is generally considered to be one of the most sustained and ambitious series on paper undertaken by Twombly. It ranks alongside his earlier Poems to the Sea in its supreme blending of senuous painterly nuance and a poetic visual dialogue expressed in a violent whirlwind of scribbles and scratched-out phrases.
The cycle consists of 38 small square sheets, each possessed with an independent integrity and enigmatic completeness, but which can be read together in sequence as a narrative. They are like the intimate pages from the artist's own personal diary. Each emotion, sensation, hope or memory is transcribed by means of a private and undecipherable calligraphy. It is as though Twombly's very thought process has been given visual form.
Letter of Resignation is therefore a poem in pictures. Heiner Bastain, editor of the Twombly Catalogue Raisonné and author of a book especially published on the cycle, calls it "a dialogue of obsessions and dreams, of history and its myths, of poetry and profane graffiti." He suggests that the title implies a confession or a sad but necessary farewell. Because of this, he relates the drawings to a period of dislocation for the artist and sees it as a prelude to a radical change in his paintings that occured after 1967.
Bastian nevertheless admits, "Whoever searches for one [clear message] in the drawings will not find it for they do not speak of it... And yet this "letter" is of particular significance. At the time it originated the visible order of the mediterranean world in Twombly's work was replaced by the experimentation with the figuration of the pictorial space: the movement of form and the prismatic dissection of its multiple states. Letter of Resignation is a farewell, though not in a literal sense..." (in: Letter of Resignation, Henier Bastian, Munich 1991)
Bastian believes that the Resignation cycle in fact forshadowed the development of Twombly's famous "grey paintings" with their slinky whirls of scribble dancing and twisting across the canvas. "Letter of Resignation is a dialogue in search of a new form of expression which already becomes apparent one year later in the paintings which were done in New York. It is a letter in two versions in which the external search for an inner correlation becomes the desire for a different space. That which is familiar to us in these drawings: Twombly's immitable line, the strokes, the handwriting of vagueness, we know as a structure from many other sheets. But here in these drawings Twombly destroys the sensitive balance of the graphic ductus. He accentuates the unuttered silent echo of that which should not be as a harsh, dark trace." (Ibid.)
Despite the fact that some of the sheets were begun in 1959 (the same year as Poems to the Sea), Letter of Resignation has a coherent unity and seems to reflect the increasingly frenetic writings of a man filled with urgency and impatience at his inability to convey his meaning. "It is the graphic stroke of children when they vehemently cross out and cover the alien writing of the factual." (Heiner Bastian, ibid.)
The white paint has a textural language and poetic purity of its own, very much akin to the paintings of Robert Ryman. At the same time it helps further obliterate the already defaced symbols and calligraphy.
In the last three sheets, it is almost as if Twombly has found a stride and his "writing" flows like prose across the pages. One can make out what appears as actual words, but they have dissolved into an illegible scrawl. Only the artist's signature on the last sheet is decipherable as he signs off the "letter", giving his identity as the author while simultaneously emphasising the confessional aspect of the series.
The cycle consists of 38 small square sheets, each possessed with an independent integrity and enigmatic completeness, but which can be read together in sequence as a narrative. They are like the intimate pages from the artist's own personal diary. Each emotion, sensation, hope or memory is transcribed by means of a private and undecipherable calligraphy. It is as though Twombly's very thought process has been given visual form.
Letter of Resignation is therefore a poem in pictures. Heiner Bastain, editor of the Twombly Catalogue Raisonné and author of a book especially published on the cycle, calls it "a dialogue of obsessions and dreams, of history and its myths, of poetry and profane graffiti." He suggests that the title implies a confession or a sad but necessary farewell. Because of this, he relates the drawings to a period of dislocation for the artist and sees it as a prelude to a radical change in his paintings that occured after 1967.
Bastian nevertheless admits, "Whoever searches for one [clear message] in the drawings will not find it for they do not speak of it... And yet this "letter" is of particular significance. At the time it originated the visible order of the mediterranean world in Twombly's work was replaced by the experimentation with the figuration of the pictorial space: the movement of form and the prismatic dissection of its multiple states. Letter of Resignation is a farewell, though not in a literal sense..." (in: Letter of Resignation, Henier Bastian, Munich 1991)
Bastian believes that the Resignation cycle in fact forshadowed the development of Twombly's famous "grey paintings" with their slinky whirls of scribble dancing and twisting across the canvas. "Letter of Resignation is a dialogue in search of a new form of expression which already becomes apparent one year later in the paintings which were done in New York. It is a letter in two versions in which the external search for an inner correlation becomes the desire for a different space. That which is familiar to us in these drawings: Twombly's immitable line, the strokes, the handwriting of vagueness, we know as a structure from many other sheets. But here in these drawings Twombly destroys the sensitive balance of the graphic ductus. He accentuates the unuttered silent echo of that which should not be as a harsh, dark trace." (Ibid.)
Despite the fact that some of the sheets were begun in 1959 (the same year as Poems to the Sea), Letter of Resignation has a coherent unity and seems to reflect the increasingly frenetic writings of a man filled with urgency and impatience at his inability to convey his meaning. "It is the graphic stroke of children when they vehemently cross out and cover the alien writing of the factual." (Heiner Bastian, ibid.)
The white paint has a textural language and poetic purity of its own, very much akin to the paintings of Robert Ryman. At the same time it helps further obliterate the already defaced symbols and calligraphy.
In the last three sheets, it is almost as if Twombly has found a stride and his "writing" flows like prose across the pages. One can make out what appears as actual words, but they have dissolved into an illegible scrawl. Only the artist's signature on the last sheet is decipherable as he signs off the "letter", giving his identity as the author while simultaneously emphasising the confessional aspect of the series.