Cy Twombly left New York in 1957 and moved to Rome, where he has lived ever since. Prior to his departure, Twombly began a group of paintings which consisted of thickly applied white paint vigorously scraped and scratched with a brush or pencil into the paint surface, rendering the work a record of the artist's actions.

Untitled's surface consists of subtle drips and nuances of gouache applied in cream tones, covered by rows of circular, calligraphic gestures drawn with graphite and most likely incised with the end of a pencil. As Roberta Smith has noted,

This extremely reduced and abstract painting shows us Twombly
scanning the works of his Minimalist compatriots. It is a
series of unhurried, widely spaced horizontal lines, runnning
edge to edge. These lines describe a gradual landfall, topo-
graphical slope in several layers, both in depth and on the vertical, but mainly they reflect a series of languid repeating
gestures of the arm (R. Smith, Cy Twombly: Rewriting History, New York 1986, n.p.).