Cy Twombly - Editions & Works on Paper New York Thursday, June 27, 2024 | Phillips

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 27 June 2024

  • Provenance

    Christie's, New York, Prints & Multiples, April 27, 2010, lot 437
    Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

  • Literature

    Heiner Bastian 79

  • Catalogue Essay

    This print was commissioned by the Yugoslavian Olympic Committee on the occasion of the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.

  • 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.

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Property from an Esteemed New York Collector

49

Cy Twombly

Untitled (B. 79)

1983
Lithograph, etching and aquatint in colors, on Arches paper, with margins.
I. 29 5/8 x 21 1/2 in. (75.2 x 54.6 cm)
S. 35 x 24 3/8 in. (88.9 x 61.9 cm)
Signed with initials and numbered 82/120 in pencil (there were also 50 in Roman numerals and 12 artist's proofs), published by Visconti Art Spectrum, Vienna, framed.

Estimate
$2,500 - 3,500 

Sold for $6,096

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 27 June 2024