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Lot Essay
Executed in the artist’s studio in Rome in 1962, the present work is replete with Cy Twombly’s iconic and frenetic scatterings of line, colour and inscription. Lyrical, cascading passages executed in ball-point pen suggest an almost automatist surrendering to medium, interspersed with lucid alphanumeric sequences in graphite and emotive, colourful outbursts of wax crayon. Inscriptions refer to the Egyptian capital of Cairo, as well as to the artist’s son, Alessandro, while numbers lead the eye in rising and falling lines. Two grid-like symbols suggest Twombly’s favoured motif of the window. Meaning is perpetually revealed and eluded as line converges and dissipates across open space. The artist approaches the clean sheet or canvas like a conductor would his orchestra, masterfully guiding line and colour towards a rousing crescendo, before letting both fall away into swift, echoing silences.
Twombly’s fascination with ancient cultures was extensive, and he drew liberally from Roman, Greek, and Egyptian imagery throughout his career. In the 1940s he had studied at the Museum School in Boston, across the road from the Museum of Fine Arts. At that time, nothing was kept in storage and the museum was a veritable cabinet of curiosities, brimming with antiquities from every culture. While throughout his life Twombly was deeply inspired by the grand narratives of Roman and Greek art—concurrent with the present work he continued his acclaimed cycle of paintings on the theme of Leda and the Swan—he identified in Egyptian art a visual language which embodied holistically the real, lived experiences of a distant people and the world they inhabited. The frieze-like schemas of Egyptian painting, with their delineations of daily life, flora and fauna, were hugely influential on Twombly’s pictorial language.
In the present work, bold lettering across the lower right of the sheet reads ‘CAIRO.’ As early as 1952 Twombly had tried to visit Egypt, whose mythologies and imagery had long gripped him. He was travelling at the time across the mediterranean with his friend and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg. An unfortunate bout of illness and political instability in North Africa impeded their efforts to reach Egypt, and they returned to Europe. A few years later, while teaching at the Southern Seminary in Boston, Twombly unsuccessfully applied for a research grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He wrote in his application that he would like to visit Paris, ‘to work and to research in the Louvre on 17th Century French painting and the Egyptian sections,’ and ‘to go eventually to Egypt (if political events allow), then to Athens and the islands of Crete and Mykonos’ (C. Twombly quoted in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, p. 61). A decade after his first attempt, Twombly finally reached Egypt in 1962, where he was moved by the depictions of daily life on the walls of ancient tombs, and spent hours in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, visiting lesser-frequented vitrines whose contents—miniatures of vehicles and furniture—revealed the fine, humble particulars of Egyptian existence.
Inscribing the present work with the name of his son, Alessandro, Twombly ruminates on the cycles of history and their continuation through progeny. Allusions to the motif of the window, a reference to the function of the picture plane as discussed by theorist Leon Battista Alberti, consider the place of art within those cycles. Out of a scribbled, swirling mass emerge lucid musings on the ability of art to capture and reflect life, through time and space. Teetering on the edges of legibility, Twombly’s remarkable visual language is at once graphic and painterly, drawing both on the dynamism of American Abstract Expressionism and the historic attention to disegno embedded within his adopted city of Rome. With immersive, intricate works like the present, he offers the viewer a glimpse inside an extraordinary artistic mind.
Twombly’s fascination with ancient cultures was extensive, and he drew liberally from Roman, Greek, and Egyptian imagery throughout his career. In the 1940s he had studied at the Museum School in Boston, across the road from the Museum of Fine Arts. At that time, nothing was kept in storage and the museum was a veritable cabinet of curiosities, brimming with antiquities from every culture. While throughout his life Twombly was deeply inspired by the grand narratives of Roman and Greek art—concurrent with the present work he continued his acclaimed cycle of paintings on the theme of Leda and the Swan—he identified in Egyptian art a visual language which embodied holistically the real, lived experiences of a distant people and the world they inhabited. The frieze-like schemas of Egyptian painting, with their delineations of daily life, flora and fauna, were hugely influential on Twombly’s pictorial language.
In the present work, bold lettering across the lower right of the sheet reads ‘CAIRO.’ As early as 1952 Twombly had tried to visit Egypt, whose mythologies and imagery had long gripped him. He was travelling at the time across the mediterranean with his friend and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg. An unfortunate bout of illness and political instability in North Africa impeded their efforts to reach Egypt, and they returned to Europe. A few years later, while teaching at the Southern Seminary in Boston, Twombly unsuccessfully applied for a research grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He wrote in his application that he would like to visit Paris, ‘to work and to research in the Louvre on 17th Century French painting and the Egyptian sections,’ and ‘to go eventually to Egypt (if political events allow), then to Athens and the islands of Crete and Mykonos’ (C. Twombly quoted in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, p. 61). A decade after his first attempt, Twombly finally reached Egypt in 1962, where he was moved by the depictions of daily life on the walls of ancient tombs, and spent hours in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, visiting lesser-frequented vitrines whose contents—miniatures of vehicles and furniture—revealed the fine, humble particulars of Egyptian existence.
Inscribing the present work with the name of his son, Alessandro, Twombly ruminates on the cycles of history and their continuation through progeny. Allusions to the motif of the window, a reference to the function of the picture plane as discussed by theorist Leon Battista Alberti, consider the place of art within those cycles. Out of a scribbled, swirling mass emerge lucid musings on the ability of art to capture and reflect life, through time and space. Teetering on the edges of legibility, Twombly’s remarkable visual language is at once graphic and painterly, drawing both on the dynamism of American Abstract Expressionism and the historic attention to disegno embedded within his adopted city of Rome. With immersive, intricate works like the present, he offers the viewer a glimpse inside an extraordinary artistic mind.