Lot Essay
This work is registered in the Bastian Archives under no. 62.46 and will be included in the forthcoming Supplement to the Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings being prepared by Mr. Heiner Bastian
In the early sixties, when many artists were taking their inspiration from Pop Culture and their work was primarily dominated by images borrowed from comicstrip magazines and supermarket shelves, Cy Twombly found different sources for his artistic creations. He transformed his canvases into great epic panoramas, into classical Greek and Roman landscapes and love cycles from the High Renaissance and the Baroque.
Twombly's imagination was fed by literature and poetry - his pictorial system a narrative one. As well as his signature, his works often prominently bore the title of the places where they were created in order to locate the setting for his updated mythologies.
Twombly spent the summer of 1962 on the Dodecanese Islands of Samos, Patmos and Rhodes; he also visited the towns of Ephesos and Didim on the Turkish coast. Upon his return to Rome, he embarked on a beautiful series of re-created personal dramas such as Birth of Venus, Hero and Leander and Leda and the Swan. This work, although untitled, clearly interprets a mythical episode around Diana (Artemis), the Goddess of hunting and virginity.
Untitled 1962 can be read as Twombly's sensitive depiction of Diana bathing. For his personal narration, the artist incorporates writing alongside painted images - a direct link to one of his vital sources, poetry. The naked goddess, named as such, is seated beside a pool to her right, in a woodland glade, represented by three rectangles of schematized trees. The scribbles, slashes and erotic signs, the sensual drips of red and pink oil may stand for the nude flesh of the nymphs who sweep off the goddess's robes and remove here sandals to bathe her feet.
The spectator feels drawn into the setting like a "voyeur" gazing at the naked deity. In this sense we are like Acteon, who was turned into a stag after coming across the bathing Diana in the forest.
Yet, this work is not merely a painting of mythology, but a visualisation of Twombly's search for his own identity. As Heiner Bastian notes, these are "Twombly's fantasies in his own Iliad......Twombly's paintings should be seen as a fusion of subjective experience displayed against the background of historical decisionism. In their language, neither content nor form are discounted let alone opposed, however conventional the contrast; rather, Twombly's paintings represent a limpid and transient option of reality." (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the paintings, Volume II, Munich 1993)
In the early sixties, when many artists were taking their inspiration from Pop Culture and their work was primarily dominated by images borrowed from comicstrip magazines and supermarket shelves, Cy Twombly found different sources for his artistic creations. He transformed his canvases into great epic panoramas, into classical Greek and Roman landscapes and love cycles from the High Renaissance and the Baroque.
Twombly's imagination was fed by literature and poetry - his pictorial system a narrative one. As well as his signature, his works often prominently bore the title of the places where they were created in order to locate the setting for his updated mythologies.
Twombly spent the summer of 1962 on the Dodecanese Islands of Samos, Patmos and Rhodes; he also visited the towns of Ephesos and Didim on the Turkish coast. Upon his return to Rome, he embarked on a beautiful series of re-created personal dramas such as Birth of Venus, Hero and Leander and Leda and the Swan. This work, although untitled, clearly interprets a mythical episode around Diana (Artemis), the Goddess of hunting and virginity.
Untitled 1962 can be read as Twombly's sensitive depiction of Diana bathing. For his personal narration, the artist incorporates writing alongside painted images - a direct link to one of his vital sources, poetry. The naked goddess, named as such, is seated beside a pool to her right, in a woodland glade, represented by three rectangles of schematized trees. The scribbles, slashes and erotic signs, the sensual drips of red and pink oil may stand for the nude flesh of the nymphs who sweep off the goddess's robes and remove here sandals to bathe her feet.
The spectator feels drawn into the setting like a "voyeur" gazing at the naked deity. In this sense we are like Acteon, who was turned into a stag after coming across the bathing Diana in the forest.
Yet, this work is not merely a painting of mythology, but a visualisation of Twombly's search for his own identity. As Heiner Bastian notes, these are "Twombly's fantasies in his own Iliad......Twombly's paintings should be seen as a fusion of subjective experience displayed against the background of historical decisionism. In their language, neither content nor form are discounted let alone opposed, however conventional the contrast; rather, Twombly's paintings represent a limpid and transient option of reality." (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the paintings, Volume II, Munich 1993)