Beschreibung:

◆ 12 Masterworks from a Private Collection Cy Twombly Follow Untitled signed and dated 'Cy Twombly 1964' lower edge; further signed, inscribed and dated ‘Cy Twombly Val Gardena aug 1964’ on the reverse pencil, coloured pencil and ballpoint pen on paper 69.9 x 99.1 cm (27 1/2 x 39 in.) Executed in 1964.
Provenance Ugo Ferranti, Rome Locksley Shea Gallery, Minneapolis Estate of John M. and Marion A. Shea, Palm Springs Christie’s, New York, 19 November 1997, lot 328 Private Collection, Belgium Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Newport Beach, Harbor Art Museum; Madison, Elvehjem Museum of Art; Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Cy Twombly Works on Paper 1954 – 1976 , 2 October 1981 – 17 October 1982, no. 14, p. 37 (illustrated) Literature Nicola del Roscio, Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonne of Drawings , 1964-1969, vol. IV, New York, 2014, no. 51, p. 57 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Delivering the impressive impact of Cy Twombly’s unique pictorial language, Untitled is a vivid example of the ‘whorl’ works that the artist created in 1964. A flurry of scribbles, scratches and loops coalesce into an abstract composition that is simultaneously delicate and dynamic – punctuated by subtle bursts of red and blue colour, and anchored by four dominant monument-like rectangular structures. Created during a spurt of creativity between July and August 1964, Untitled belongs to a suite of nineteen drawings called Notes from a Tower that Twombly embarked on at Castel Gardena, a Renaissance castle in the Italian Alps that he regularly visited in summer. Charged with frenetic energy, other examples from this series reside in prominent collections, such as that of Jasper Johns the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, the latter previously belonging to fellow artist Roy Lichtenstein Executed at a pivotal point in the artist’s career, Untitled suspends the viewer in a moment of spirited sublimity. Created seven years after the artist’s career-defining move to Rome in 1957 , Untitled epitomizes the revolutionary visual idiom that Twombly developed in response to the mythical past of his surroundings and his immediate experiences in Italy. Speaking in 1957, ‘Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realisation’ (Cy Twombly quoted in ‘Signs’, L’Esperienza moderna , no. 2, August/September 1957, pp. 32–33). While his American counterparts were finding inspiration in Pop culture or Minimalism, Twombly, ever the contrarian, was embarking upon a series of groundbreaking works inspired by the epic and dramatic panoramas and classical landscapes of the High Renaissance and Baroque. Untitled is emblematic of the seminal body of work that Twombly created in the 1960s, widely considered as a critical and extremely fertile period in his long and illustrious career. As Simon Schama has observed, ‘Twombly’s creative energy erupts, turning out an extended series of untitled compositions in which pictograms and ideograms…swim and seethe in a broth of jittery action’ (Simon Schama, Cy Twombly Fifty Years of Works on Paper , exh. cat., State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 14). While Twombly’s 1961-1963 series of works frequently referenced specific Classical tales as a point of departure, the present work demonstrates how, starting in 1964, Twombly’s work is characterised by that which Roland Barthes termed a '“Mediterranean effect”: a topology of references constituting, ‘an enormous complex of memories and sensations…a historical, mythological, poetic culture, this whole life of forms, colors and light which occurs at the frontier of the terrestrial landscape and the plains of the sea’ (Roland Barthes, quoted in ‘The Wisdom of Art’ , in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly , Munich, 2002, p. 19). The drawings Twombly created in the summer of 1964 at the Castel Gardena represent a crucial stage in the formal evolution of Twombly’s oeuvre in that period. Twombly began work on this series shortly after completing the triptych Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) , 1964, in Rome; Part I of this work