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Lot Essay
Between May and September 1969 Twombly lived and worked in the Palazzo del Drago a house owned by his friend Giovanni del Dago on the shores of a picturesque lake north of Rome known as Lago Di Bolsena. Between August and September of this year he executed a unique series of large paintings on both white and grey grounds that mark a significant development in the direction of his work of the late1960s. This group of paintings has inevitably come to be known as the Bolsena series. Untitled is one of the first of this important series.
After the debacle of Twombly's Discourse on Commodus show at the Castelli Gallery in New York in 1964 in which the artist's presentation of a series of nine paintings on the theme of the psychotic Roman emperor Commodus had caused what Donald Judd was to describe as a "fiasco", Twombly's art took a dramatic turn. Twombly's uniquely personal, highly tactile, and seemingly spontaneous style of painting had been deemed at this show to be a thoroughly subjective continuation of the principles of the Informel and consequently - in the age of the cold objectivity of Pop Art and Minimalism - hopelessly outdated. The severe critical reaction that accompanied this show, prompted Twombly to become, what he later described as, "the happiest painter around" because, he explained, "for a couple of years: no one gave a damn what I did". The harsh criticism Twombly received however, did evidently force some kind of change in his working process, for, in the immediate aftermath of the show Twombly produced only twenty paintings throughout 1964 and almost none in 1965. When he resumed a more regular painting practice in 1966, the paintings that appeared marked a significant change in direction. Predominantly executed on dark grey grounds, Twombly's paintings of the late 1960s reflect the artist's increasing interest in the concepts of time, space and measurement as well a concern with the systemic development of line. In works such as Night Watch of 1966 for example, Twombly describes in raw white outline against a dark grey background, the process of a cube turning in space. In other works on a dark ground - now known colloquially as "blackboards" - Twombly developed the concept of writing into a spiralling cyclical progression in which systemic repetition and nuance generate a poetic sense of a journey through space and time.
These works clearly seem to reflect an awareness of the Minimalist aesthetics that dominate the period, but at the same time they are also a development and a consequence of Twombly's interest in Leonardo's studies of nature. As Kirk Varnedoe has eloquently written about the nature of Twombly's interest in Leonardo's studies, they seem to reflect an intuitive and almost neurotic obsession with system. Varnedoe points out that "Joseph Beuys was (also) attracted to the same aspects of Leonardo's drawings, because he saw in these innumerable dissections, diagrams, and codes something irrationally driven, by a demon of secret knowledge, and freighted with a private poetry of obsession." It is this sense of "secret knowledge" and of a "private poetry of obsession" that also distinguishes the quasi-scientific look of many of Twombly's late 1960s paintings. Too distanced and impersonal to be seen as reflective of Abstract Expressionism and too undisciplined and subjective to be thought of as Minimalist or Conceptual works, these late 1960s paintings are in fact closer to the kind of Post-Minimalist aesthetic to be found in the work of artists like Eva Hesse for example, that was at this time, just beginning to emerge.
Twombly's dark ground paintings were first started in Italy and were later continued in New York in the artist's studios in the Bowery and on Canal Street where their cool geometry came to reflect the location of their creation. The works Twombly produced in Lake Bolsena in 1969 gain a very different feeling from these New York precedents and similarly seem to increasingly reflect the properties of the unique location in which they were made. The basic formal ideas behind the Bolsena series were first formulated in a series of drawings that Twombly made in January 1969 while staying at Grand Case on the island of St Martin in the Caribbean. These works included a number of tracings of seashells in and around a cascading system of outlined rectangles that were peppered with cryptic notations and some scrawled sexual imagery. This series of works also set the tone for the mixing of light and dark ground paintings that characterises the Bolsena works.
In contrast to these beginnings however, the resultant pictures that Twombly painted in the Palazzo del Drago turned out very differently. Painted between August and September of 1969 they increasingly came to reflect the dominant talking point of that summer: the Apollo moon landings. Against a background of much scientific talk about vectors, orbits and distances in space and time Twombly formulated these pictures - which also deal, albeit loosely and more poetically, with the concept of space-time - in such a way that, inevitably, through a process of osmosis, direct references to the Apollo mission, both oblique and overt, found their way into the paintings.
In conversations the artist had with Heiner Bastian in1976 and 1993, Twombly confirmed that he had closely followed the coverage of the moon landings during the summer of 1969 and that there are many references to the Apollo missions in the works he produced at Lake Bolsena. One of the sparser works from the series, Untitled , with its horizon-line like division of dark empty space, seems to show a complex mathematical formulation articulating the void of a blackboard-like wilderness of poured, scrawled and mopped paint. Short linear incisions and a lopsided rectangle annotated with numbers signifying lengths and/or degrees seem to carve out an obscure geometric meaning to the picture that indicates an intellectual human projection of rational thought marking a linear progression in space and time. The minimalism of the image reflects a continuation of Twombly's work with horizontal linear progression that had characterised such earlier paintings as Treatise on the Veil (1968 version) and the Veil of Orpheus, but the Bolsena context of this painting, inevitably draws parallels between its seemingly static and measured rectangle and the dynamic slipstream of cascading oblongs to be found in the pale-ground Bolsena works. Part post-minimalist formulation of geometry, part whimsical numeric poetry Untitled with its blackboard-like image of a higher mathematics of the mind is a work that eloquently expresses the intellectual atmosphere of a very specific time and place.
After the debacle of Twombly's Discourse on Commodus show at the Castelli Gallery in New York in 1964 in which the artist's presentation of a series of nine paintings on the theme of the psychotic Roman emperor Commodus had caused what Donald Judd was to describe as a "fiasco", Twombly's art took a dramatic turn. Twombly's uniquely personal, highly tactile, and seemingly spontaneous style of painting had been deemed at this show to be a thoroughly subjective continuation of the principles of the Informel and consequently - in the age of the cold objectivity of Pop Art and Minimalism - hopelessly outdated. The severe critical reaction that accompanied this show, prompted Twombly to become, what he later described as, "the happiest painter around" because, he explained, "for a couple of years: no one gave a damn what I did". The harsh criticism Twombly received however, did evidently force some kind of change in his working process, for, in the immediate aftermath of the show Twombly produced only twenty paintings throughout 1964 and almost none in 1965. When he resumed a more regular painting practice in 1966, the paintings that appeared marked a significant change in direction. Predominantly executed on dark grey grounds, Twombly's paintings of the late 1960s reflect the artist's increasing interest in the concepts of time, space and measurement as well a concern with the systemic development of line. In works such as Night Watch of 1966 for example, Twombly describes in raw white outline against a dark grey background, the process of a cube turning in space. In other works on a dark ground - now known colloquially as "blackboards" - Twombly developed the concept of writing into a spiralling cyclical progression in which systemic repetition and nuance generate a poetic sense of a journey through space and time.
These works clearly seem to reflect an awareness of the Minimalist aesthetics that dominate the period, but at the same time they are also a development and a consequence of Twombly's interest in Leonardo's studies of nature. As Kirk Varnedoe has eloquently written about the nature of Twombly's interest in Leonardo's studies, they seem to reflect an intuitive and almost neurotic obsession with system. Varnedoe points out that "Joseph Beuys was (also) attracted to the same aspects of Leonardo's drawings, because he saw in these innumerable dissections, diagrams, and codes something irrationally driven, by a demon of secret knowledge, and freighted with a private poetry of obsession." It is this sense of "secret knowledge" and of a "private poetry of obsession" that also distinguishes the quasi-scientific look of many of Twombly's late 1960s paintings. Too distanced and impersonal to be seen as reflective of Abstract Expressionism and too undisciplined and subjective to be thought of as Minimalist or Conceptual works, these late 1960s paintings are in fact closer to the kind of Post-Minimalist aesthetic to be found in the work of artists like Eva Hesse for example, that was at this time, just beginning to emerge.
Twombly's dark ground paintings were first started in Italy and were later continued in New York in the artist's studios in the Bowery and on Canal Street where their cool geometry came to reflect the location of their creation. The works Twombly produced in Lake Bolsena in 1969 gain a very different feeling from these New York precedents and similarly seem to increasingly reflect the properties of the unique location in which they were made. The basic formal ideas behind the Bolsena series were first formulated in a series of drawings that Twombly made in January 1969 while staying at Grand Case on the island of St Martin in the Caribbean. These works included a number of tracings of seashells in and around a cascading system of outlined rectangles that were peppered with cryptic notations and some scrawled sexual imagery. This series of works also set the tone for the mixing of light and dark ground paintings that characterises the Bolsena works.
In contrast to these beginnings however, the resultant pictures that Twombly painted in the Palazzo del Drago turned out very differently. Painted between August and September of 1969 they increasingly came to reflect the dominant talking point of that summer: the Apollo moon landings. Against a background of much scientific talk about vectors, orbits and distances in space and time Twombly formulated these pictures - which also deal, albeit loosely and more poetically, with the concept of space-time - in such a way that, inevitably, through a process of osmosis, direct references to the Apollo mission, both oblique and overt, found their way into the paintings.
In conversations the artist had with Heiner Bastian in1976 and 1993, Twombly confirmed that he had closely followed the coverage of the moon landings during the summer of 1969 and that there are many references to the Apollo missions in the works he produced at Lake Bolsena. One of the sparser works from the series, Untitled , with its horizon-line like division of dark empty space, seems to show a complex mathematical formulation articulating the void of a blackboard-like wilderness of poured, scrawled and mopped paint. Short linear incisions and a lopsided rectangle annotated with numbers signifying lengths and/or degrees seem to carve out an obscure geometric meaning to the picture that indicates an intellectual human projection of rational thought marking a linear progression in space and time. The minimalism of the image reflects a continuation of Twombly's work with horizontal linear progression that had characterised such earlier paintings as Treatise on the Veil (1968 version) and the Veil of Orpheus, but the Bolsena context of this painting, inevitably draws parallels between its seemingly static and measured rectangle and the dynamic slipstream of cascading oblongs to be found in the pale-ground Bolsena works. Part post-minimalist formulation of geometry, part whimsical numeric poetry Untitled with its blackboard-like image of a higher mathematics of the mind is a work that eloquently expresses the intellectual atmosphere of a very specific time and place.