"The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning. It's like I'm experiencing the thing and I have to be at that state because I’m also going."
—Cy Twombly

 

 

Fluctuating between the lyrical and tempestuous, emotive and mysterious, Cy Twombly’s Untitled is a tour de force of the artist’s late oeuvre. Belonging to an exclusive series of six eponymous paintings completed in the autumn of 2006 in his hometown of Lexington, Virginia, the present composition is among Twombly’s final great paintings that coalesced his various explorations throughout the trajectory of the artist’s career with unprecedented prowess: his signature lasso loops on a monochrome background, his fascination with myth and history, and his concerns with ideas of writing and language that served as key conceptual foundations of his oeuvre. Here, billowing red loops of paint are scrawled on an off-white ground, radiating with a raw intensity which is enhanced by the visceral drips oozing down the canvas. Presenting a palimpsest of Twombly’s celebrated painterly practice, Untitled captures “Twombly's gestures [as] a creative act in which he captured the physical impulses of a subject that fascinated him, while at the same time revealing his own inner world.”ⁱ 

 

Returning to the looping motif established in his pivotal Blackboard paintings of the late 1960s, Twombly’s Untitled series of 2006 belongs to his late cycle of Dionysian paintings created between 2005 and 2008, situating itself alongside his celebrated and closely related Bacchus works. In the series comprising the present work, each composition shares a vertical format and similar grandiose scale measuring roughly 7 by 5 feet. Featuring two to four rows of coiled pseudo-script, these works marked an ambitious development from the Blackboards in Twombly’s expansion of scale, the wider looping forms, and flowing red lines of acrylic that advanced from the artist’s earlier use of white-wax crayon. As Nela Pavlouskova observed, the body of Untitled works from 2006 is distinctive from the other Dionysian paintings as a notable precursor to the compositional framework and explosive chromaticism of the artist’s Camino Real series of 2010-2011 that would comprise his final artistic offering.ⁱⁱ Here, the densely layered loops swell and break off in a kind of ecstatic dance, the sinuous forms at once rhythmically fluid and calligraphically expressive. “Twombly has made frequent use of the ‘O’-shape that is such a striking feature of Untitled,” Katharina Schmidt noted of the present work, an element that harks back to paintings such as his famous Olympia, 1957.ⁱⁱⁱ 

 

"Dionysus, it emerges, is a double movement. His madness is a circle of fire, an unbroken circuit of excess, each attempt at containment spilling into the next [in Twombly’s work]."
—Malcolm Bull

In Untitled, Twombly’s dialogue with his earlier work is further established in the painting’s Dionysian spirit. Like his Bacchus paintings, the present work alludes to the artist’s career-long fascination with Dionysus, the Greek god of winemaking, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness—a subject he particularly explored through the 1970s and 1980s both obliquely and directly such as in Fifty Days of Illiam, 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art and a 1981 triptych Bacchus, among others. In the present work, Twombly captures a riotous Bacchanalian energy in the rise and fall of the dynamic trochoidal curves and expressionist drips, the red vermillion paint at once evocative of wine and blood as well as Homer’s legendary epithet of the “wine-dark sea, an allusion frequently cited in his oeuvre.”^iv  Embodying the artist’s famous declaration that “to paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release...one ecstatic impulse,” here the increasing enlargement of the painterly skeins from the top to bottom of the composition manifest a sense of gradual build up to a rapturous explosion that materializes in the oozing pigment like a descending firework.^v

 

"For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)."
—Cy Twombly

In Untitled, the twists and swirls evoke the whirlpools of Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings, a deeply rooted influence in Twombly’s practice since the 1960s when the artist first became preoccupied with the Italian master’s studies of water. Leonardo’s investigations of translating water and air into line finds echoes in Twombly’s singular language of abstraction, as the undulating loops here recall the sensation of rolling waters of the sea—again bringing to mind the allusion to Homer—set against the “open air” suggested by the cream-colored monochrome background. As Henri Bastian described of works such as Untitled and the Bacchus paintings, “‘Oceanic’ would be one of the words for this emotive, circular, frame-filling movement without a center. Dissonant and harmonic, deforming and real, but also beyond the pure bond of comprehensible ‘beauty.’”^vi

 

 

"[For Twombly] words become lines expressive of feeling, lines become tones, tones become tensions, white becomes resolution. All this happens with the flowing naturalness of handwriting…[it] seems to us both primeval and innovative, like memory itself and its energies."
—Harald Szeemann

Further inspired by Leonardo’s notebooks, Twombly found the resonance of a kind of cryptic poetry in the Old Master’s scrawls as did Joseph Beuys before him, which became deeply imbedded into his own painterly sensibility. Indeed for Twombly, the idea of handwriting that pervaded his line-based compositions also played in tandem with the written word in which he found such inspiration—i.e., myths, poems, histories—allowing him to suggest multilayered narratives in his paintings. As he expressed in a 2007 interview, “I never really separated painting and literature.”^vii Along with its light ground and the organization of four cursive-like forms in rows, the present work’s vertical format recalls a page of text, while Twombly’s inclusion of his initials at the top left corner introduces the artist as “author.” By not just revisiting but reworking his handwriting device at the end of his painterly career, the present work testifies to Twombly’s unrelenting pursuit of chasing new ideas and modes of communication in conveying meaning. Here, the presentation of his iconic visual lexicon encourages us to “read” the symbols as if to attempt decoding his ciphered language, despite its legibility and intelligibility rendered impossible through Twombly’s exclusion of context. Embodying an emphatic celebration of the artist’s prolific career, Untitled comes full circle to Twombly’s now-established axiom from 1957. “Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate, it is the sensation of its own realization...a synthesis of feeling, intellect, etc., occurring without separation in the impulse of action.”^viii 

 

 
ⁱ Nela Pavlouskova, Cy Twombly Late Paintings 2003-2011, trans. David H. Wilson, London, 2015, p. 51.
ⁱⁱ Ibid., p. 36.
ⁱⁱⁱ Katharina Schmidt, “A Look at Recent Paintings by Cy Twombly,” trans. Michael Foster, in Cy Twombly, exh. cat., Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich, 2007, n.p.
^iv Nicholas Cullinan and Nicholas Serota, “‘Ecstatic Impulses’: Cy Twombly's Untitled (Bacchus), 2006-08,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 152, no. 1290, September 2010, p. 615.
^v Cy Twombly, quoted in “Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly,” L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, August-September 1957, p. 52.
^vi Heiner Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume V, 1996-2007, Munich, 2009, p. 46.
^vii Cy Twombly, quoted in Nicholas Serota, “History Behind the Thought” [2007], in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2008, p. 45.
^viii Cy Twombly, “Documenti di una nuova figurazione: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Pierre Alechinsky, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly,” L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, August-September 1957, p. 32.