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Lot Essay
Cy Twombly is one of the masters of poetic abstract painting of the 20th Century. Since his first mature paintings in the 1950's, Twombly has explored the expressive and elegant possibilities of markmaking, often incorporating hand-written words, phrases or poems directly into the composition. Twombly's paintings are often large-scale, but his paintings on paper are generally much more modest in scale and often dense with pigment and detail.
14 Papers and a related series of works led to the epic suite of light-dappled abstracted landscapes in the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston. In them, Twombly juxtaposes overwhelming waves of green and black with passages of stark white. In 14 Papers, an explosive smear of green tones (a.k.a. "Hooker's Green") race horizontally across the sheet, with shards of electric oranges and reds occasionally showing through. The notations scrawled in mostly blood red along the lower edge, in Twombly's characteristically expressive scrawl, refer to his house and studio, titled Silverwood, located in Lexington, Virginia.
14 Papers and a related series of works led to the epic suite of light-dappled abstracted landscapes in the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston. In them, Twombly juxtaposes overwhelming waves of green and black with passages of stark white. In 14 Papers, an explosive smear of green tones (a.k.a. "Hooker's Green") race horizontally across the sheet, with shards of electric oranges and reds occasionally showing through. The notations scrawled in mostly blood red along the lower edge, in Twombly's characteristically expressive scrawl, refer to his house and studio, titled Silverwood, located in Lexington, Virginia.