9 A Tale of Two Cities: Property from the Estate of Howard Karshan Cy Twombly Follow Sperlonga drawing signed and dedicated 'to Turcato, Cy Twombly' lower right oil-based house paint, pencil and wax crayon on paper 70 x 100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.) Executed in 1959.
Provenance Giulio Turcato Rome Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London Acquired from the above by the late owner in July 1996 Literature Nicola Del Roscio, CY TWOMBLY Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings, vol. 2, 1956 - 1960, Munich, 2012, no. 142, p. 176 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Gesturally rendered in paint, crayon and graphite on paper, Cy Twombly’s Sperlonga drawing , executed in 1959, belongs to a succinct body of work which the artist commenced during his summer stay in the Italian seaside town inbetween Naples and Rome. Gifted to the esteemed artist Giulio Turcato who, in 1958, had been honoured at the Venice Biennale with a curated room at the 29th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia , the present work on paper was created in Sperlonga the year following Turcato’s exhibition and has been housed in the Karshan collection since 1996. Marking a pivotal moment in Twombly’s personal life, the artist’s body of Sperlonga works are integral when looking at the artist’s wider oeuvre and represent a key turning point in his artistic development, with notable examples represented in major public and private international institutions. Transporting us to the coast of Italy the present work is charged with the sublime light of the Mediterranean, evoking the landscape of the fishing village on the Tyrrhenian sea. Having first travelled to Europe in 1952 visiting both Naples and Rome and then again in 1957, Twombly married Luisa Tatiana Franchetti at New York City Hall in April 1959. Soon integrated into her network of European and Italian friends and relatives, Twombly travelled to Rome in June with his new wife, embarking on a life-long fascination with the country. Twombly rented an apartment in the small fishing village of Sperlonga with Franchetti who was expecting the couple’s child. Famed for its ancient Roman history, a sea grotto was discovered on the grounds of the villa of Tiberius in 1957, two years prior to the execution of the present work, unveiling a series of exquisite carved marble sculptures that captured narratives from Homer’s Odyssey . Set into a rocky hollow, these magnificent white Sperlonga marbles are a celebration of the Hellenistic style and showcase an artistic culmination of art and nature. Creating around thirty-two mixed media drawings and nineteen collages during this summer as well as his twenty-four part Poems to the Sea, Twombly’s rich corpus of Sperlonga works toyed with negative space, exposing large areas of open paper within the composition, evocative of the fresh sea breeze and expanse of sky. Integrating dashes, circles, symbols and numbers into his Sperlonga drawing, the present work showcases Twombly’s progressive experimentation with visual syntax and mark-marking. Through his delicate and bold strokes, Twombly’s Sperlonga drawings mark this juncture and also celebrate the rhythmic tide and power of the Tyrrhenian sea. Influenced by the poetry of Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé, whose use of white space, blanks and cadent marks toyed with typography, Twombly’s Sperlonga drawings allude to Mallarmé’s shipwreck poem Un Coup de Dés, channelling a literary poesy in visual form. As noted by Kirk Varnedoe, Twombly’s ‘drawings from Sperlonga though, initiated a more paradoxical combination of elements, which would inform Twombly’s paintings for years thereafter. The pencilwork introduced a family of “rationalized”, diagrammatic elements … sequences of numbers; circles and repeated semicircles; and clusters of forms that suggest overhead, plan views of unknown arrangements.…The resultant drawings – with their long horizontality, dispersed and often miniaturized signs, and references to rational mapping – seem to join the Poems to the Sea in opening up a new, specifically landscape-like space in Twombly’s work’ (Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in, Cy Twombly A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 31-32). With its white washed walls and sun bleached
9 A Tale of Two Cities: Property from the Estate of Howard Karshan Cy Twombly Follow Sperlonga drawing signed and dedicated 'to Turcato, Cy Twombly' lower right oil-based house paint, pencil and wax crayon on paper 70 x 100 cm (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.) Executed in 1959.
Provenance Giulio Turcato Rome Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London Acquired from the above by the late owner in July 1996 Literature Nicola Del Roscio, CY TWOMBLY Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings, vol. 2, 1956 - 1960, Munich, 2012, no. 142, p. 176 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Gesturally rendered in paint, crayon and graphite on paper, Cy Twombly’s Sperlonga drawing , executed in 1959, belongs to a succinct body of work which the artist commenced during his summer stay in the Italian seaside town inbetween Naples and Rome. Gifted to the esteemed artist Giulio Turcato who, in 1958, had been honoured at the Venice Biennale with a curated room at the 29th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia , the present work on paper was created in Sperlonga the year following Turcato’s exhibition and has been housed in the Karshan collection since 1996. Marking a pivotal moment in Twombly’s personal life, the artist’s body of Sperlonga works are integral when looking at the artist’s wider oeuvre and represent a key turning point in his artistic development, with notable examples represented in major public and private international institutions. Transporting us to the coast of Italy the present work is charged with the sublime light of the Mediterranean, evoking the landscape of the fishing village on the Tyrrhenian sea. Having first travelled to Europe in 1952 visiting both Naples and Rome and then again in 1957, Twombly married Luisa Tatiana Franchetti at New York City Hall in April 1959. Soon integrated into her network of European and Italian friends and relatives, Twombly travelled to Rome in June with his new wife, embarking on a life-long fascination with the country. Twombly rented an apartment in the small fishing village of Sperlonga with Franchetti who was expecting the couple’s child. Famed for its ancient Roman history, a sea grotto was discovered on the grounds of the villa of Tiberius in 1957, two years prior to the execution of the present work, unveiling a series of exquisite carved marble sculptures that captured narratives from Homer’s Odyssey . Set into a rocky hollow, these magnificent white Sperlonga marbles are a celebration of the Hellenistic style and showcase an artistic culmination of art and nature. Creating around thirty-two mixed media drawings and nineteen collages during this summer as well as his twenty-four part Poems to the Sea, Twombly’s rich corpus of Sperlonga works toyed with negative space, exposing large areas of open paper within the composition, evocative of the fresh sea breeze and expanse of sky. Integrating dashes, circles, symbols and numbers into his Sperlonga drawing, the present work showcases Twombly’s progressive experimentation with visual syntax and mark-marking. Through his delicate and bold strokes, Twombly’s Sperlonga drawings mark this juncture and also celebrate the rhythmic tide and power of the Tyrrhenian sea. Influenced by the poetry of Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé, whose use of white space, blanks and cadent marks toyed with typography, Twombly’s Sperlonga drawings allude to Mallarmé’s shipwreck poem Un Coup de Dés, channelling a literary poesy in visual form. As noted by Kirk Varnedoe, Twombly’s ‘drawings from Sperlonga though, initiated a more paradoxical combination of elements, which would inform Twombly’s paintings for years thereafter. The pencilwork introduced a family of “rationalized”, diagrammatic elements … sequences of numbers; circles and repeated semicircles; and clusters of forms that suggest overhead, plan views of unknown arrangements.…The resultant drawings – with their long horizontality, dispersed and often miniaturized signs, and references to rational mapping – seem to join the Poems to the Sea in opening up a new, specifically landscape-like space in Twombly’s work’ (Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in, Cy Twombly A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 31-32). With its white washed walls and sun bleached
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
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