Untitled (Roma)

Executed in 1961, Untitled (Roma) reflects the new ethereal quality that entered Twombly's work shortly after he moved to Rome in 1957. With deft touches, loops and scrawls accompanied by a faint tensile graphite line that punctuates the middle ground of the painting, the work reads like a mental landscape or a graphic poem whose isolated and essentially separate parts hang together in a complex and shifting arena of associative meaning. "Every line is thus the actual experience with its own unique story," Twombly explains, "It does not illustrate; it is the perception of its own realisation" (K. Schmidt, Cy Twombly, Houston 1990, p. 11).

In the present work, various encrypted marks of graphite wander like writing across the canvas, their indecipherable scribbly style and rebus-like look evoking hidden meanings in our mind. Various shapes--a mouth with pink lips, circles and daubs of paint like breasts, phallic forms--lend a breezy sexuality which is reinforced by the sensual application of the light-green paint on the left side of the picture. This paint, obscuring some marks as clouds would the sky, and the green and brown paint along the lower half of the painting, create a landscape strewn with the detrius of the mind's thoughts over time. One tends to read such a painting as one would a poem, scanning it over and over again, picking up a thought or a phrase that is particularly attractive, attempting to read the artist's mind, only to lose track, move on and return to one's own thoughts.