Lot Essay
Twombly first executed ten sculptures between 1946 and 1949, not returning to the medium until 1976. Since then he has created between thirty and forty works, all of which are consistently personal and delicate. Formed from a combination of found materials, organic or scrap, clay or plasticine, sometimes with plaster and sand (used to bind them together; the original being lost in the casting process), they "exist outside the real-time and ongoing metamorphosis of his two-dimensional work...they inform, and are informed by, his paintings and drawings, providing a constant distillation of his sensibility, one that is full of keys and signals" ( R. Smith, "The Great Mediator," in H. Szeemann, Cy Twombly, Munich, 1987, p. 20).
As with many of his other sculptures executed in 1987, Twombly here favors a vertical format resembling figures abstracted from the everyday and filtered through an intimate history of art. They recall both classical form and the modernist work of Twombly's predecessors such as Giacometti, but above all they are personal and childlike, constructions made through a sensibility that touches the world both navely and in an intensely knowing way. Twombly said "I really enjoy doing sculpture; maybe it's because of the construction thing" (Quoted in D. Sylvester, Cy Twombly Ten Sculptures, New York, 1997, p. 8). They are painted white, which both unifies them and gives them an ethereal aura. Harald Szeeman wrote of them, "They transmit an unreal, elusive radiance. They are transmitters of light, transmitters of silence, transmitters of poetry....with all the gaucherie of a naive artist, unspoilt and casual as ever, but including signs of the considerable time spent in meditation upon the objects and their past existence, Twombly bypasses alienation and transports them directly from banality to spirituality... It enters the category of ennobled objects; it becomes sculpture" (H. Szeeman, "Cy Twombly: An Appreciation," Cy Twombly, Munich, 1987, p. 11).
As with many of his other sculptures executed in 1987, Twombly here favors a vertical format resembling figures abstracted from the everyday and filtered through an intimate history of art. They recall both classical form and the modernist work of Twombly's predecessors such as Giacometti, but above all they are personal and childlike, constructions made through a sensibility that touches the world both navely and in an intensely knowing way. Twombly said "I really enjoy doing sculpture; maybe it's because of the construction thing" (Quoted in D. Sylvester, Cy Twombly Ten Sculptures, New York, 1997, p. 8). They are painted white, which both unifies them and gives them an ethereal aura. Harald Szeeman wrote of them, "They transmit an unreal, elusive radiance. They are transmitters of light, transmitters of silence, transmitters of poetry....with all the gaucherie of a naive artist, unspoilt and casual as ever, but including signs of the considerable time spent in meditation upon the objects and their past existence, Twombly bypasses alienation and transports them directly from banality to spirituality... It enters the category of ennobled objects; it becomes sculpture" (H. Szeeman, "Cy Twombly: An Appreciation," Cy Twombly, Munich, 1987, p. 11).