.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1959, Untitled shimmers like a mirage before the viewer. Its elusive signs and writings lie just beyond the grasp of our conscious comprehension, but remain infinitely evocative. Numbers, half-formed words, sketched shapes and lines are littered across the surface as though they were barely-remembered blueprints. This picture is universal, its texture invoking that of an ageless artifact, yet at the same time is an ephemeral gestural landscape, each pencil mark and drip of paint tracing the artist's own movements and feelings. There is a hint of science in the numbers and some of the repeated forms, yet the faint hints of colour reveal the artist peeking, the residual traces of the artist's own vocation. These marks come to form an existential declaration, a proof of movement, of feeling and ultimately even of life. And yet, seemingly absorbed by the haze of the pale background, these arcane annotations remain ultimately unreadable to the viewer, allowing Twombly to illustrate the impossible plight of communication both on an artistic level, and on the wider human scale.
Discussing the idiosyncratic marks that fill his pictures, Twombly explained that 'Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate-- it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception.
'This is very difficult to describe, but it is an involvement in essence (no matter how private) into a synthesis of feeling, intellect etc, occurring without separation in the impulse of action' (Twombly, quoted in K. Varnedoe (ed.), Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh.cat., New York, 1994, p. 27).
Untitled is therefore an accumulation of thought and action, a dense slice of Twombly's own life that touches upon both his inner world and his physical life. The picture is not the medium between the artist and his message, but is instead the domain in which his feelings and movements have been crystallized and preserved. They appear nonetheless insubstantial, especially towards the higher areas of Untitled, as though the very solidity and existence of these recorded gestures were under threat, as though Twombly's attempts to convey himself through his art have faded, are dissolving in the air and dissipating like a mist into the ether.
During the two years prior to the execution of Untitled, Twombly had spent much of his time in Italy. Since the early 1950s, he had been drawn there by its culture, its history, its palpable sense of antiquity: '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). This had come to flavor his pictures as well-- Untitled's texture lends it the sense that it has its own history, that it is the visible proof of an accretion of events, both artistic and experiential. But sometimes one needs to take a step back in order to leap forwards: for the first months of 1959 Twombly stayed in New York and Lexington, Virginia, and it was during this time, a new sparseness began to breathe through his work. It is this same ethereal quality that fills Untitled. Gone are the thicker, more vicious and solid scrawls of his earlier Italian works, replaced by a lightness that speaks of transience, as though the half symbols, words, numbers and forms that are scattered across the canvas had melted into existence, and are once more melting out of it.
Following Twombly's marriage to Tatiana Franchetti and their honeymoon in Mexico and Cuba, the couple returned to the artist's adoptive home, Italy, and during a crucial, brief period there, this spectral appearance in his paintings reached its apogee. Untitled, alongside a small number of other large-scale works, combines the restraint and ghostly whiteness of the American pictures, yet crucially predates Twombly's use of artist's oils, which would imminently come into his works and would change their character. This use of oil paint applied directly to the canvas would lend his pictures a tangible sensuality that would dispel the hauntingly ethereal air that has reached such a poetic peak in Untitled.
Before this use of oils, Twombly did use house paint in his pictures, lending them an extra layer texture, not least through the dripping, chance-driven appearance on the surface. This use of house paint reveals the extent to which the 'background' of Untitled was no such thing, but was itself a key element upon which the focus of the viewer should be applied. This whiteness is not there merely to thrust the signs and scrawls into bolder relief, but is the key element in itself. One of Twombly's key influences was the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. Twombly was particularly intrigued by Mallarmé's interest in white, as is reflected in his words from only two years before Untitled was created:
'The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear).
'Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance-- or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé.
'The exact implication may never be analyzed, but in that it persists as the landscape of my actions, it must imply more than selection' (Twombly, quoted in Varnedoe (ed.), op.cit., 1994, p.27).
Many of the Abstract Expressionists and artists of the Post-War period were interested in Mallarmé's declaration of his anxiety when faced by the white page (all too often inadequately translated as 'blank' from the French, blanc), as was Twombly, and this in part drives both his use of direct and frantic gestures. But, as the above quote reveals, Twombly was interested in other aspects of the Symbolist's use of white, not least in his use of blancs in the lay-out of his poems, especially his celebrated Un coup de dés. In this work, the words were scattered following Mallarmé's own instructions in order the better to manipulate the viewer's eyes and imagination, lending the poem a visual rhythm. In his preface to Un coup de dés, Mallarmé explained that these blancs 'assume an importance, striking first: versification required them like a surrounding silence... I don't transgress against this system, but simply disperse it. The paper intervenes every time an image on its own ceases or retires within the page, accepting the succession of others... The text imposes itself in various places, near or far from the latent guiding thread, according to what seems to be the probable sense... The fiction will come to the surface and rapidly dissipate as the writing shifts about, around the fragmentary halts of the sentence... Everything happens by shortcut, hypothetically; story telling is avoided. Add to that: that from this naked use of thought, retreating, prolonging, fleeing, or from its very design, there results for the person reading it aloud, a musical score' (Mallarmé, preface to Un coup de dés, trans. P. Hoover and reproduced at his website, paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com).
It is precisely this effect that Twombly achieves through the use of the blank space in Untitled and the interplay between that space and the various pencil and colored marks. There is a lyrical rhythm to the picture, accentuated by the artist's leaving the upper parts of the picture largely unarticulated, as though it were the sky while the lower portions are a more solid realm. The whiteness thrusts some of the marks into relief, but also seems to threaten to absorb other ones. Meanwhile, the constellations of marks, letters and forms have their own almost musical appearance, their own internal logic. However automatically Twombly may have created Untitled, it nonetheless reveals his sophisticated appreciation of complex composition. 'Every little point sets up a tension with something else,' he explained. 'Each mark or shape is in a natural position. I mean, I don't see anything that looks arbitrary or self-consciously placed. To me, it looks as if it happened naturally, and that's the point I strive for' (Twombly, quoted in Leeman, op.cit., 2005, p. 105).
Discussing the idiosyncratic marks that fill his pictures, Twombly explained that 'Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate-- it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception.
'This is very difficult to describe, but it is an involvement in essence (no matter how private) into a synthesis of feeling, intellect etc, occurring without separation in the impulse of action' (Twombly, quoted in K. Varnedoe (ed.), Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh.cat., New York, 1994, p. 27).
Untitled is therefore an accumulation of thought and action, a dense slice of Twombly's own life that touches upon both his inner world and his physical life. The picture is not the medium between the artist and his message, but is instead the domain in which his feelings and movements have been crystallized and preserved. They appear nonetheless insubstantial, especially towards the higher areas of Untitled, as though the very solidity and existence of these recorded gestures were under threat, as though Twombly's attempts to convey himself through his art have faded, are dissolving in the air and dissipating like a mist into the ether.
During the two years prior to the execution of Untitled, Twombly had spent much of his time in Italy. Since the early 1950s, he had been drawn there by its culture, its history, its palpable sense of antiquity: '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). This had come to flavor his pictures as well-- Untitled's texture lends it the sense that it has its own history, that it is the visible proof of an accretion of events, both artistic and experiential. But sometimes one needs to take a step back in order to leap forwards: for the first months of 1959 Twombly stayed in New York and Lexington, Virginia, and it was during this time, a new sparseness began to breathe through his work. It is this same ethereal quality that fills Untitled. Gone are the thicker, more vicious and solid scrawls of his earlier Italian works, replaced by a lightness that speaks of transience, as though the half symbols, words, numbers and forms that are scattered across the canvas had melted into existence, and are once more melting out of it.
Following Twombly's marriage to Tatiana Franchetti and their honeymoon in Mexico and Cuba, the couple returned to the artist's adoptive home, Italy, and during a crucial, brief period there, this spectral appearance in his paintings reached its apogee. Untitled, alongside a small number of other large-scale works, combines the restraint and ghostly whiteness of the American pictures, yet crucially predates Twombly's use of artist's oils, which would imminently come into his works and would change their character. This use of oil paint applied directly to the canvas would lend his pictures a tangible sensuality that would dispel the hauntingly ethereal air that has reached such a poetic peak in Untitled.
Before this use of oils, Twombly did use house paint in his pictures, lending them an extra layer texture, not least through the dripping, chance-driven appearance on the surface. This use of house paint reveals the extent to which the 'background' of Untitled was no such thing, but was itself a key element upon which the focus of the viewer should be applied. This whiteness is not there merely to thrust the signs and scrawls into bolder relief, but is the key element in itself. One of Twombly's key influences was the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé. Twombly was particularly intrigued by Mallarmé's interest in white, as is reflected in his words from only two years before Untitled was created:
'The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear).
'Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance-- or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé.
'The exact implication may never be analyzed, but in that it persists as the landscape of my actions, it must imply more than selection' (Twombly, quoted in Varnedoe (ed.), op.cit., 1994, p.27).
Many of the Abstract Expressionists and artists of the Post-War period were interested in Mallarmé's declaration of his anxiety when faced by the white page (all too often inadequately translated as 'blank' from the French, blanc), as was Twombly, and this in part drives both his use of direct and frantic gestures. But, as the above quote reveals, Twombly was interested in other aspects of the Symbolist's use of white, not least in his use of blancs in the lay-out of his poems, especially his celebrated Un coup de dés. In this work, the words were scattered following Mallarmé's own instructions in order the better to manipulate the viewer's eyes and imagination, lending the poem a visual rhythm. In his preface to Un coup de dés, Mallarmé explained that these blancs 'assume an importance, striking first: versification required them like a surrounding silence... I don't transgress against this system, but simply disperse it. The paper intervenes every time an image on its own ceases or retires within the page, accepting the succession of others... The text imposes itself in various places, near or far from the latent guiding thread, according to what seems to be the probable sense... The fiction will come to the surface and rapidly dissipate as the writing shifts about, around the fragmentary halts of the sentence... Everything happens by shortcut, hypothetically; story telling is avoided. Add to that: that from this naked use of thought, retreating, prolonging, fleeing, or from its very design, there results for the person reading it aloud, a musical score' (Mallarmé, preface to Un coup de dés, trans. P. Hoover and reproduced at his website, paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.com).
It is precisely this effect that Twombly achieves through the use of the blank space in Untitled and the interplay between that space and the various pencil and colored marks. There is a lyrical rhythm to the picture, accentuated by the artist's leaving the upper parts of the picture largely unarticulated, as though it were the sky while the lower portions are a more solid realm. The whiteness thrusts some of the marks into relief, but also seems to threaten to absorb other ones. Meanwhile, the constellations of marks, letters and forms have their own almost musical appearance, their own internal logic. However automatically Twombly may have created Untitled, it nonetheless reveals his sophisticated appreciation of complex composition. 'Every little point sets up a tension with something else,' he explained. 'Each mark or shape is in a natural position. I mean, I don't see anything that looks arbitrary or self-consciously placed. To me, it looks as if it happened naturally, and that's the point I strive for' (Twombly, quoted in Leeman, op.cit., 2005, p. 105).