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拍品专文
‘It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening’ (Cy Twombly)
Previously owned by the noted Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme collector Wolfgang Hahn, Untitled (Rome) (1961) is an effusive, sunlit painting by Cy Twombly. It captures the flowering of Twombly’s art as he settled in Rome in 1961, channelling inspiration from antiquity, poetry, urban life and raw bodily instinct into what would become his most celebrated works. In upheaval against the bright, aerated expanse of open canvas, the painting’s surface is earthy and tactile. Impasto daubs of peach, yellow, white and oxblood red are applied straight from the tube, and lashed through with arcing brushstrokes. The artist’s bare hand leaves prints across the picture, like primeval marks on a cave wall. Graphite scrawls record a tempo of scattered numbers and—at the picture’s heart—the inscription ‘Cy Twombly, Roma 1961.’ Its rising motion climaxes in a broad, solar sweep of yellows, smeared into a blaze of light. The painting has been unseen in public since an exhibition of Hahn’s collection at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne in 1968, and was acquired from him several years later by the present owner.
Twombly travelled through Italy and North Africa in the early 1950s with his friend Robert Rauschenberg, whom he had met at Black Mountain College in Colorado. He settled permanently in Rome in 1961, renting a studio in Piazza del Biscione near the Campo de’ Fiori. The paintings he created during that year’s hot summer, writes Kirk Varnedoe, are ‘among the most impressive, most emotionally wrought works of Twombly’s career’, at once elegant and gloriously extravagant. Varnedoe compares them to ‘the changing rhythms of an immense fireworks display: their explosive energy is sometimes lyrical and confetti-like in its delicacy, sometimes frenetic and concussive in its impact’ (K. Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, pp. 34, 35). The year was defined by momentous works such as the Ferragosto series, School of Athens and Triumph of Galatea, charged with fleshy and carnal motifs. In Untitled (Rome) as in those paintings, Twombly’s passion bursts forth in a lovestruck ode to his new home.
Twombly’s works were informed both by Rome’s rich history and its contemporary life. One of his favoured afternoon pastimes was to sit with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream in a preferred café, watching the activity of passersby who strolled, laughed, flirted, and conversed around him. He drew upon the riotous Ferragosto celebrations—a public holiday with origins going back to the reign of the Emperor Augustus—as well as the passions of divine figures such as Leda, Venus, Cupid and Galatea. Graffiti and classical verse met on equal footing in his work. With explosive scripts, scrawls and daubs of vivid colour, Twombly was able to yoke together direct, somatic sensual expression with evocations of poetry and myth. His hybrid painterly language fused the modernist abstraction he had left behind in America with the grandeurs of an ancient European past.
Intrigued by Surrealist automatism, Twombly had drawn at night during his time as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army in 1953-1954, seeking to untrain his hand from his eye. ‘It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting,’ he explained: ‘not as if you were painting an object … it’s like coming through the nervous system. It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening’ (C. Twombly in conversation with D. Sylvester, in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 179). This immediacy came to its full fruition in works like Untitled (Rome), where the paint is electric with movement and the artist’s hand makes direct contact with the canvas. While Twombly’s approach would evolve across the decades—from the pared-back ‘blackboard’ paintings of the later 1960s to his vast, spacious narrative cycles of the 1970s and beyond—the vital, intuitive synthesis of gesture, script, line and image in Untitled (Rome) manifests the moment his art burst into life.
***
Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection
Across our 20th / 21st Century London Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale and Post-War and Contemporary Art Online sale in London this season, Christie’s is delighted to present Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection. Led by Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Rome) (1961)—an explosion of painterly joy created in his most celebrated period—this diverse array of works offers a remarkable snapshot of the post-war avant-garde in Europe.
These paintings, drawings and sculptures have been unseen in public since the collection was assembled in the 1970s and 1980s. They were acquired from important galleries of the time such as Galerie Bonnier in Geneva and Galerie Stadler in Paris, and—in the case of the works by Twombly, Hans Hartung, Konrad Klapheck and Ernst Wilhelm Nay—from the esteemed Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus collector Wolfgang Hahn, chief conservator at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Much of Hahn’s holdings were acquired by the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) in Vienna in 1978, becoming a central part of the museum’s permanent collection.
The vitality of Art Informel is on full display. From Twombly’s gestural brushwork to the tactile reliefs of Antoni Tàpies, paint becomes sculptural or even archaeological matter, leaping the boundaries between art and life. A superb Concetto spaziale (1960) by Lucio Fontana takes this materiality to its transcendent climax, with the artist punching holes through the canvas to reach a new dimension.
Like Twombly, Sam Francis was an American in Europe: his Red, Yellow, Blue (1957) exemplifies his fusion of Abstract Expressionist ideas with the lyrical light and colour of French painting. Hans Hartung, the German-French painter represented here by an elegant composition from 1952, forged his own language of Tachisme in the same medium, characterised by swift, calligraphic brushstrokes.
Other key names in the collection include the Nouveaux Réalistes Arman, César and Jean Tinguely. These artists sought to bridge the art-life divide with a radical approach to everyday objects, creating something of a European counterpart to Pop Art.
The German artist Konrad Klapheck explored related ideas of mechanisation and commerce. His visionary, dreamlike painting Die Stufen der Ewigkeit (The Steps of Eternity) (1961) presents a surreal scene with a Pop-art sheen, as indebted to Duchamp’s objets trouvés as it is to Klapheck’s deadpan ‘machine’ paintings.
Across a wide range of media, from works on paper and small-scale sculptures to rich, textural paintings, Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection forms a colourful survey of the ways in which artists brought material to life in post-war Europe, keeping pace with an era of dynamic societal, cultural and aesthetic change. They are complemented, finally, by two works from Alice Bailly: a pioneering Swiss artist of an earlier avant-garde era, involved in Fauvism, Dada and Cubism and known for her pictures embroidered in wool.
Previously owned by the noted Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme collector Wolfgang Hahn, Untitled (Rome) (1961) is an effusive, sunlit painting by Cy Twombly. It captures the flowering of Twombly’s art as he settled in Rome in 1961, channelling inspiration from antiquity, poetry, urban life and raw bodily instinct into what would become his most celebrated works. In upheaval against the bright, aerated expanse of open canvas, the painting’s surface is earthy and tactile. Impasto daubs of peach, yellow, white and oxblood red are applied straight from the tube, and lashed through with arcing brushstrokes. The artist’s bare hand leaves prints across the picture, like primeval marks on a cave wall. Graphite scrawls record a tempo of scattered numbers and—at the picture’s heart—the inscription ‘Cy Twombly, Roma 1961.’ Its rising motion climaxes in a broad, solar sweep of yellows, smeared into a blaze of light. The painting has been unseen in public since an exhibition of Hahn’s collection at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne in 1968, and was acquired from him several years later by the present owner.
Twombly travelled through Italy and North Africa in the early 1950s with his friend Robert Rauschenberg, whom he had met at Black Mountain College in Colorado. He settled permanently in Rome in 1961, renting a studio in Piazza del Biscione near the Campo de’ Fiori. The paintings he created during that year’s hot summer, writes Kirk Varnedoe, are ‘among the most impressive, most emotionally wrought works of Twombly’s career’, at once elegant and gloriously extravagant. Varnedoe compares them to ‘the changing rhythms of an immense fireworks display: their explosive energy is sometimes lyrical and confetti-like in its delicacy, sometimes frenetic and concussive in its impact’ (K. Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, pp. 34, 35). The year was defined by momentous works such as the Ferragosto series, School of Athens and Triumph of Galatea, charged with fleshy and carnal motifs. In Untitled (Rome) as in those paintings, Twombly’s passion bursts forth in a lovestruck ode to his new home.
Twombly’s works were informed both by Rome’s rich history and its contemporary life. One of his favoured afternoon pastimes was to sit with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream in a preferred café, watching the activity of passersby who strolled, laughed, flirted, and conversed around him. He drew upon the riotous Ferragosto celebrations—a public holiday with origins going back to the reign of the Emperor Augustus—as well as the passions of divine figures such as Leda, Venus, Cupid and Galatea. Graffiti and classical verse met on equal footing in his work. With explosive scripts, scrawls and daubs of vivid colour, Twombly was able to yoke together direct, somatic sensual expression with evocations of poetry and myth. His hybrid painterly language fused the modernist abstraction he had left behind in America with the grandeurs of an ancient European past.
Intrigued by Surrealist automatism, Twombly had drawn at night during his time as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army in 1953-1954, seeking to untrain his hand from his eye. ‘It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting,’ he explained: ‘not as if you were painting an object … it’s like coming through the nervous system. It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening’ (C. Twombly in conversation with D. Sylvester, in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London 2001, p. 179). This immediacy came to its full fruition in works like Untitled (Rome), where the paint is electric with movement and the artist’s hand makes direct contact with the canvas. While Twombly’s approach would evolve across the decades—from the pared-back ‘blackboard’ paintings of the later 1960s to his vast, spacious narrative cycles of the 1970s and beyond—the vital, intuitive synthesis of gesture, script, line and image in Untitled (Rome) manifests the moment his art burst into life.
***
Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection
Across our 20th / 21st Century London Evening Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale and Post-War and Contemporary Art Online sale in London this season, Christie’s is delighted to present Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection. Led by Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Rome) (1961)—an explosion of painterly joy created in his most celebrated period—this diverse array of works offers a remarkable snapshot of the post-war avant-garde in Europe.
These paintings, drawings and sculptures have been unseen in public since the collection was assembled in the 1970s and 1980s. They were acquired from important galleries of the time such as Galerie Bonnier in Geneva and Galerie Stadler in Paris, and—in the case of the works by Twombly, Hans Hartung, Konrad Klapheck and Ernst Wilhelm Nay—from the esteemed Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus collector Wolfgang Hahn, chief conservator at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Much of Hahn’s holdings were acquired by the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) in Vienna in 1978, becoming a central part of the museum’s permanent collection.
The vitality of Art Informel is on full display. From Twombly’s gestural brushwork to the tactile reliefs of Antoni Tàpies, paint becomes sculptural or even archaeological matter, leaping the boundaries between art and life. A superb Concetto spaziale (1960) by Lucio Fontana takes this materiality to its transcendent climax, with the artist punching holes through the canvas to reach a new dimension.
Like Twombly, Sam Francis was an American in Europe: his Red, Yellow, Blue (1957) exemplifies his fusion of Abstract Expressionist ideas with the lyrical light and colour of French painting. Hans Hartung, the German-French painter represented here by an elegant composition from 1952, forged his own language of Tachisme in the same medium, characterised by swift, calligraphic brushstrokes.
Other key names in the collection include the Nouveaux Réalistes Arman, César and Jean Tinguely. These artists sought to bridge the art-life divide with a radical approach to everyday objects, creating something of a European counterpart to Pop Art.
The German artist Konrad Klapheck explored related ideas of mechanisation and commerce. His visionary, dreamlike painting Die Stufen der Ewigkeit (The Steps of Eternity) (1961) presents a surreal scene with a Pop-art sheen, as indebted to Duchamp’s objets trouvés as it is to Klapheck’s deadpan ‘machine’ paintings.
Across a wide range of media, from works on paper and small-scale sculptures to rich, textural paintings, Matter in Motion: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection forms a colourful survey of the ways in which artists brought material to life in post-war Europe, keeping pace with an era of dynamic societal, cultural and aesthetic change. They are complemented, finally, by two works from Alice Bailly: a pioneering Swiss artist of an earlier avant-garde era, involved in Fauvism, Dada and Cubism and known for her pictures embroidered in wool.