Cy Twombly - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale - Morning Session New York Thursday, November 18, 2021 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Paul Bianchini, New York
    Private Collection
    Phillips, London, February 8, 2016, lot 16
    Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Columbia, McKissick Museum, A Campus Collects, 1980
    Columbia, McKissick Museum, Paper Pleasures: Five Centuries of Drawings and Watercolors, June–November 1992, n.p.

  • Artist Biography

    Cy Twombly

    American • 1928 - 2011

    Cy Twombly emerged in the mid-1950s alongside New York artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. While at first developing a graffiti-like style influenced by Abstract Expressionist automatism–having notably studied under Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell at the legendary Black Mountain College between 1951 and 1952–Twombly was a prominent figure in the new generation of artists that challenged the abstract orthodoxy of the New York School. Twombly developed a highly unique pictorial language that found its purest expression upon his life-defining move to Rome in 1957. Simultaneously invoking classical history, poetry, mythology and his own contemporary lived experience, Twombly's visual idiom is distinguished by a remarkable vocabulary of signs and marks and the fusion of word and text. 

    Cy Twombly produced graffiti-like paintings that were inspired by the work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. His gestural forms of lines, drips and splattering were at first not well-received, but the artist later became known as the leader of the estrangement from the Abstract Expressionism movement. Full of energy and rawness, Twombly's pieces are reminiscent of childhood sketches and reveal his inspiration from mythology and poetry.

    View More Works

Ο◆150

Untitled

signed, inscribed and dated "Cy Twombly St. Maartin 69" upper right
pencil, coloured pencil and pastel on paper
22 3/4 x 30 3/4 in. (57.8 x 78.1 cm)
Executed in 1969, this work will be included in the forthcoming Addenda to the Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings being prepared by Nicola Del Roscio.

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $529,200

Contact Specialist

John McCord
Head of Day Sale, Morning Session, New York
+1 212 940 1261
jmccord@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale - Morning Session

New York Auction 18 November 2021