.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Executed in Rome in 1962, the present work is a dynamic effusion of colour and line dating from one of Cy Twombly’s finest periods. Originally owned by the esteemed British collectors Laura and Barry Townsley, it captures the fervent bravura of the artist’s emotional and intellectual response to Italy during the early 1960s. Frenetic loops of pencil spiral their way into oblivion. Faint hints of letters and symbols punctuate the surface; sensual tones of red and peach, sparingly applied in crayon and oil, quiver like glimpses of flesh. Contemporaneous with masterpieces such as Leda and the Swan (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Hero and Leander and Second Voyage to Italy (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome), it demonstrates the outpouring of visceral energy and movement that would leave its mark upon some the artist’s most important canvases, haunted by the ghosts of ancient history, mythology and literature.
Twombly had moved to Rome in 1957, having first visited on a trip to Europe and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg in five years earlier. It was there, among the city’s architectural ruins, magnificent Baroque frescoes and graffitied stone walls, that his practice took flight. His works built upon the early language he had cultivated in New York, forged against the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism and informed by his time as a cryptologist in the US Army. While completing military service between 1953 and 1954, Twombly had practised drawing in the dark at night, seeking to untrain his hand from his eye. These experiments would give rise to a practice driven by line: a powerful, sensory force that—in his hands—was able to tap into the rhythms of human consciousness. In a city riddled with the scars of its own making, these gestures came to life, each scrawl, loop and scribble charged with the vibrations of antiquity.
Twombly’s works of the early 1960s are characterised by their frenzied ‘Dionysian’ energy: a freewheeling sense of perpetual motion that would come to a head in his groundbreaking ‘blackboard’ paintings later that decade. In 1961, the artist had moved to a new studio on the Piazza del Biscione. There, writes Kirk Varnedoe, he began a series of paintings that stand among ‘the most impressive, most emotionally wrought works of [his] career’ (K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, pp. 34-35). The present work’s carnal palette calls to mind the violence and eroticism that wrote its way into canvases including the Ferragosto cycle (1961), Birth of Venus (1962), and his epic responses to Homer’s Iliad. His use of circles with crosses in the centre invites comparison with the 1964 canvas Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) (1964), in which the same motif references chariot wheels wiped out in battle. The letter ‘A’ in the lower left-hand corner, too, might be seen to allude to the Trojan War hero Achilles: a recurring figure in Twombly’s practice. Perhaps, though—like other works from this period—it also implicates the artist’s young son Alessandro, offering a momentary incursion into his domestic world.
For all their immediacy and dynamism, works such as the present were frequently the products of extended contemplation. Twombly famously spent long periods reading before starting to paint, absorbing the works of Virgil, Catullus, Keats, Rilke and others. He was particularly inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé, and his notion of white paper as a blank conceptual field in which time, space, thought and image could coalesce. The present work’s pale pictorial ground bears witness to this influence, its surface dotted with ciphers and markers that seem to suggest the passage of the mind through the pages of history and verse. White, for Twombly, was also deeply bound to the image of the Mediterranean’s vast, mythic waters, sparkling with arcadian light. With its pencil flourishes evocative of Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings, the present work might also be seen to quiver with the memory of the various sailing trips undertaken by Twombly in 1962, notably down the Nile and around the coastlines of Greece and Turkey. Voyages real, mythic and metaphysical map themselves out upon the canvas, charting—with electrifying force—the digressions of Twombly’s internal landscape.
Twombly had moved to Rome in 1957, having first visited on a trip to Europe and North Africa with Robert Rauschenberg in five years earlier. It was there, among the city’s architectural ruins, magnificent Baroque frescoes and graffitied stone walls, that his practice took flight. His works built upon the early language he had cultivated in New York, forged against the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism and informed by his time as a cryptologist in the US Army. While completing military service between 1953 and 1954, Twombly had practised drawing in the dark at night, seeking to untrain his hand from his eye. These experiments would give rise to a practice driven by line: a powerful, sensory force that—in his hands—was able to tap into the rhythms of human consciousness. In a city riddled with the scars of its own making, these gestures came to life, each scrawl, loop and scribble charged with the vibrations of antiquity.
Twombly’s works of the early 1960s are characterised by their frenzied ‘Dionysian’ energy: a freewheeling sense of perpetual motion that would come to a head in his groundbreaking ‘blackboard’ paintings later that decade. In 1961, the artist had moved to a new studio on the Piazza del Biscione. There, writes Kirk Varnedoe, he began a series of paintings that stand among ‘the most impressive, most emotionally wrought works of [his] career’ (K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, pp. 34-35). The present work’s carnal palette calls to mind the violence and eroticism that wrote its way into canvases including the Ferragosto cycle (1961), Birth of Venus (1962), and his epic responses to Homer’s Iliad. His use of circles with crosses in the centre invites comparison with the 1964 canvas Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) (1964), in which the same motif references chariot wheels wiped out in battle. The letter ‘A’ in the lower left-hand corner, too, might be seen to allude to the Trojan War hero Achilles: a recurring figure in Twombly’s practice. Perhaps, though—like other works from this period—it also implicates the artist’s young son Alessandro, offering a momentary incursion into his domestic world.
For all their immediacy and dynamism, works such as the present were frequently the products of extended contemplation. Twombly famously spent long periods reading before starting to paint, absorbing the works of Virgil, Catullus, Keats, Rilke and others. He was particularly inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé, and his notion of white paper as a blank conceptual field in which time, space, thought and image could coalesce. The present work’s pale pictorial ground bears witness to this influence, its surface dotted with ciphers and markers that seem to suggest the passage of the mind through the pages of history and verse. White, for Twombly, was also deeply bound to the image of the Mediterranean’s vast, mythic waters, sparkling with arcadian light. With its pencil flourishes evocative of Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings, the present work might also be seen to quiver with the memory of the various sailing trips undertaken by Twombly in 1962, notably down the Nile and around the coastlines of Greece and Turkey. Voyages real, mythic and metaphysical map themselves out upon the canvas, charting—with electrifying force—the digressions of Twombly’s internal landscape.