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 color, 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 where he regularly summered. 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.

 

 

   

"When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time."
—Cy Twombly

 

Created seven years after the artist’s career-defining move to Rome in 1957, the present work epitomizes the revolutionary visual idiom that Twombly developed in response to the mythical past of his surroundings and his immediate experiences in Italy. In 1957, he expressed, “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization.”ⁱ While his American counterparts were finding inspiration in Pop culture or Minimalism, Twombly, ever the contrarian, was developing 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.”ⁱⁱ 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 characterized 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.”ⁱⁱⁱ 
 

 

 

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 titled One Morning Ten Years Later, 1964, in Rome; Part I of this work resides in The Broad Museum, Los Angeles. While drawing upon the events leading up to the Trojan War, as detailed in Homer’s epic The Iliad, Twombly creates an ambivalent scene, evocative of a frenzied battle, but also a “deliberately eroticized apotheosis of life and death.”^iv Through his experimentations in his Notes from a Tower series, Twombly further developed these iconographic themes, in anticipation of his solo exhibition The Artist in the Northern Climate at the Galerie Friedrich + Dahlen, Munich, in the autumn of 1964 where he exhibited a selection of the Castel Gardena drawings alongside ten paintings created for the exhibition. While resuming the visual dialogue with the Notes from a Tower works, these paintings introduced an unprecedented level of formal reduction that was characterized by an emphasis on the dominant rectangular structures. Situated at this critical juncture, Untitled articulates an important evolution in Twombly’s practice, which culminated in the artist’s celebrated mid–1960s monochromatic, grey paintings.

 

ⁱ Cy Twombly, quoted in “Signs,” L’Esperienza moderna, no. 2, August/September 1957, pp. 32–33.
ⁱⁱ Simon Schama, Cy Twombly Fifty Years of Works on Paper, exh. cat., State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 14.
ⁱⁱⁱ Roland Barthes, quoted in “The Wisdom of Art,” in Nicola Del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich, 2002, p. 19.
^iv Heiner Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1961-1965, Munich, 1993, p. 30.