Beschreibung:

23Cy TwomblyPortrait of Alvise di Robilantinscribed 'ALVISE DI ROBILANT' upper edge oil-based house paint, graphite and wax crayon on canvas 149.5 x 124.5 cm (58 7/8 x 49 in.) Executed in 1967. Full CataloguingEstimate £500,000 - 700,000 ‡ Place Advance BidContact Specialist Kate Bryan Specialist, Head of Evening Sale +44 20 7318 4026 kbryan@phillips.com
OverviewCy Twombly’s uniquely intimate Portrait of Alvise di Robilant captures the eponymous man’s silhouette, soaring against an untouched background. A friend of Twombly’s since the late 1950s, Alvise di Robilant was an Italian journalist and writer born in Bologna in 1925, whose life tragically came to an end in 1997 when he was anonymously murdered in the Palazzo Rucellai, his apartment in Florence. Di Robilant had become friends with Twombly through his wife Betty Stokes, whom the artist had met in Lexington, Virginia, where they had both been under the tutelage of the artist Pierre Daura Following Twombly’s enrolment in Black Mountain College in 1951, and Stokes’ initial move to New York around the same time, the two remained in close epistolary contact until he came to visit her and her husband Alvise in their Grottaferrata home, in the summer of 1957. Executed ten years after this seminal encounter, one year after Stokes’ and di Robilant’s ten year wedding anniversary, and three years after the birth of their son Tristano (who went on to become Twombly’s godson), Portrait of Alvise di Robilant is a sublimely tender canvas that has remained in the di Robilant family for decades. As such, it exists as a living testament to the patriarch’s strong bond with the artist, as well as an enduring link to later generations of the family. Mario Dondero, Portrait of Cy Twombly in the streets of Rome, 1961, photograph. © Mario Dondero / Bridgeman Images. Characterised by an esoteric yet profoundly elegant linework, Portrait of Alvise di Robilant encapsulates Twombly’s exquisite draughtsmanship, concentrated at the centre of a blank paper, as if inviting the surrounding white background to fulfil the image. ‘I’ve been reading seriously Mallarmé and Pound’, Twombly wrote to his gallerist Eleanor Ward in 1957; ‘Whiteness can be the classical state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance—or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé’. Indeed, Twombly espoused the French poet’s view that ‘the blankness of the white paper; a significant silence that it is no less lovely to compose than verse’. Here, Alvise di Robilant exists as a frenzied figure devised by Twombly’s idiosyncratic hand, paired with the visual embodiment of silence, materialised by the colour white. As such, Twombly allies notions of motion and stillness, fullness and void – a paradoxical amalgamation testifying to the artist’s creative ingenuity. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Stéphane Mallarmé, 1982, lithograph, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Image: Bridgeman Images. Alvise di Robilant was notably created after a number of Twombly’s most defining artistic watersheds – his years living in New York, sharing a studio with Robert Rauschenberg his experience as a cryptologist in the US army, where he learned the mysterious and perfunctory language of codes and cyphers, and his move to Rome in 1957, encouraged by Stokes in a number of shared letters. As such, the present work lives as a mature example of his opus, but also reflects the importance of the subject at its core – one that had an indirect effect on his wider oeuvre. The artist’s stay with Alvise and Betty di Robilant in Grottaferrata in the summer of 1957 subsequently informed the direction of his practice, whereby his colour palette became energised by the heat, the food, the light of the city, and his linework became increasingly liberated, esoteric and elegant – almost like dancing calligraphy. 'The line is a visible action. The line, however supple, light, or uncertain it may be, always refers to a force, to a direction; it is an energon, a labor which reveals - which makes legible - the trace of its pulsion and its expenditure.' —Roland Barthes Indeed, as with Twombly’s best work, there seems to be a directly link existing between his gestures, enabled by his superior draughtmanship, and the ensuing intimacy of his feverish lines, revealing the different stages of conception and completion of his env