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拍品專文
Across the surface of the present work unfolds Cy Twombly’s iconic, looping script. Executed in 1970, concurrent with the artist’s celebrated series of ‘blackboard’ paintings of 1966-1971, it dates to a seminal period in his career. Four spiralling lines of blue wax crayon glide across thin washes of light-blue paint, suggesting a kind of proto-handwriting, the essence of an elusive script. Two shades of waxy crayon are layered; on top a deeper blue, and below a lighter tone, gently smudged by the artist’s hand as it moves at pace across the sheet. The effect of these interlacing wax traces is of a soft, animate shadow. Acquired by the present owner from the gallery La Tartaruga, Rome, in 1970, Untitled belongs to a small series of drawings executed in the city across 1970-1971, two of which are held in the collection of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Upon returning to New York the following year, Twombly would produce an extended series of these works with the same script-like composition, titled ‘Roman Notes,’ a diary-like outpouring of nostalgia for the city which had nourished his art so profoundly.
The present work was executed at Twombly’s apartment on Via di Monserrato. The room he used as his studio was enormous, five metres high and ten by twelve metres in length and width. Nicola Del Roscio—Twombly’s assistant and archivist of many years—recalls the spectacular, theatrical atmosphere in which the 1970 Roman drawings were made. Initially, Del Roscio would lay sheets of newspaper on the floor and furniture to protect it from paint splatters, leaving empty pathways in places to allow Twombly to pass, as if through a garden. If a breeze came through the open window, or a door swung too heavily, the pages would flutter and swell like an ocean, lending the space a magical, dynamic air. On top of this mass of newspaper would be placed drawing paper, which Twombly brushed with a thinned oil-paint wash in shimmering blue-grey tones. Finally he wielded blue wax crayons, lucidly guiding his hand across the page in a series of lilting, swirling loops. Del Roscio likens the crayon in Twombly’s hand to ‘a conductor’s wand, moving as if by magic and describing a soundless track in the imperceptible attempt to describe a sound’ (N. Del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. 5, 1970-1971, Munich 2015, p. 6).
Since 1960, when Twombly and his wife Tatiana Franchetti acquired the palazzo on Via di Monserrato, he had been firmly entrenched within the artistic ferment of Rome. Young Italian artists of the ‘Scuola di Piazza del Popolo,’ such as Umberto Bignardi, Franco Angeli, and Tano Festa congregated around the gallery La Tartaruga, and met late into the night at the Piazza del Popolo’s Caffè Rosati, where they drew others—Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, and Twombly—who, for longer or shorter periods, were passing through. Twombly had made the Eternal City his home. One of his favoured pastimes was, in the late afternoon, to sit with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream in one or two of his preferred cafés in the city, watching the activity of passersby who strolled, laughed, flirted, and conversed around him. In the present work, the boundless energy and easy flow of the city is captured in the sure, rhythmic pacing of Twombly’s line.
Echoes of Italy’s rich artistic lineage are embedded within Twombly’s oeuvre. His 1960 canvas To Leonardo anticipated a decade of increasing interest in the Renaissance master, and within the present work’s ever-spiralling line—its loops and slashes, flicks and curves—da Vinci’s mesmeric ink drawings, passages of mirror-script writing, and annotated notebook pages reverberate. Looking beyond the scientific or analytical aspects of his output, Twombly took from Leonardo something more essential and intangible—what Kirk Varnedoe called ‘a private poetry of obsession’ (K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, A Retrospective, exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, p. 41). He identified a similar potency of line and feeling in the maelstrom of Italian Futurist paintings by artists such as Giacomo Balla or Umberto Boccioni, whose rigid linearity is felt in the steady slashes and soft curves which intersect across Twombly’s sheet. At the same time, since the mid-1960s Twombly had been spending large parts of each year in New York, working in studios on the Bowery and on Canal Street. An artist whose practice spanned the Atlantic, in the steady yet fluid inflection of his line, and soft variation within a largely monochromatic palette, is a tension between the poles of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and an assertion of Twombly’s singular artistic expression.
The rows of running loops which characterise Twombly’s artistic output around the time of the present work have often been compared to the Palmer Method exercises imposed on American schoolchildren as they learnt to write, aspiring towards an instinct reached through repetition. While serving as a cryptologist in the US Army during the 1950s Twombly himself had spent time drawing in the dark, freeing the hand from the eye in a manner related to Surrealist automatism. Abstracted and absented of meaning, his script in the present work extends in one fluid motion a steady flow of energy from mind to hand to sheet. Against blank spaces of repose, the linear continuity of Twombly’s scrawl—each soaring loop and plunging dash, extending ad infinitum into the wider series and Roman Notes which followed—becomes a poignant distillation of the drive which fuelled one of the twentieth century’s most poetic artistic thinkers.
The present work was executed at Twombly’s apartment on Via di Monserrato. The room he used as his studio was enormous, five metres high and ten by twelve metres in length and width. Nicola Del Roscio—Twombly’s assistant and archivist of many years—recalls the spectacular, theatrical atmosphere in which the 1970 Roman drawings were made. Initially, Del Roscio would lay sheets of newspaper on the floor and furniture to protect it from paint splatters, leaving empty pathways in places to allow Twombly to pass, as if through a garden. If a breeze came through the open window, or a door swung too heavily, the pages would flutter and swell like an ocean, lending the space a magical, dynamic air. On top of this mass of newspaper would be placed drawing paper, which Twombly brushed with a thinned oil-paint wash in shimmering blue-grey tones. Finally he wielded blue wax crayons, lucidly guiding his hand across the page in a series of lilting, swirling loops. Del Roscio likens the crayon in Twombly’s hand to ‘a conductor’s wand, moving as if by magic and describing a soundless track in the imperceptible attempt to describe a sound’ (N. Del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. 5, 1970-1971, Munich 2015, p. 6).
Since 1960, when Twombly and his wife Tatiana Franchetti acquired the palazzo on Via di Monserrato, he had been firmly entrenched within the artistic ferment of Rome. Young Italian artists of the ‘Scuola di Piazza del Popolo,’ such as Umberto Bignardi, Franco Angeli, and Tano Festa congregated around the gallery La Tartaruga, and met late into the night at the Piazza del Popolo’s Caffè Rosati, where they drew others—Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, and Twombly—who, for longer or shorter periods, were passing through. Twombly had made the Eternal City his home. One of his favoured pastimes was, in the late afternoon, to sit with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream in one or two of his preferred cafés in the city, watching the activity of passersby who strolled, laughed, flirted, and conversed around him. In the present work, the boundless energy and easy flow of the city is captured in the sure, rhythmic pacing of Twombly’s line.
Echoes of Italy’s rich artistic lineage are embedded within Twombly’s oeuvre. His 1960 canvas To Leonardo anticipated a decade of increasing interest in the Renaissance master, and within the present work’s ever-spiralling line—its loops and slashes, flicks and curves—da Vinci’s mesmeric ink drawings, passages of mirror-script writing, and annotated notebook pages reverberate. Looking beyond the scientific or analytical aspects of his output, Twombly took from Leonardo something more essential and intangible—what Kirk Varnedoe called ‘a private poetry of obsession’ (K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, A Retrospective, exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1994, p. 41). He identified a similar potency of line and feeling in the maelstrom of Italian Futurist paintings by artists such as Giacomo Balla or Umberto Boccioni, whose rigid linearity is felt in the steady slashes and soft curves which intersect across Twombly’s sheet. At the same time, since the mid-1960s Twombly had been spending large parts of each year in New York, working in studios on the Bowery and on Canal Street. An artist whose practice spanned the Atlantic, in the steady yet fluid inflection of his line, and soft variation within a largely monochromatic palette, is a tension between the poles of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and an assertion of Twombly’s singular artistic expression.
The rows of running loops which characterise Twombly’s artistic output around the time of the present work have often been compared to the Palmer Method exercises imposed on American schoolchildren as they learnt to write, aspiring towards an instinct reached through repetition. While serving as a cryptologist in the US Army during the 1950s Twombly himself had spent time drawing in the dark, freeing the hand from the eye in a manner related to Surrealist automatism. Abstracted and absented of meaning, his script in the present work extends in one fluid motion a steady flow of energy from mind to hand to sheet. Against blank spaces of repose, the linear continuity of Twombly’s scrawl—each soaring loop and plunging dash, extending ad infinitum into the wider series and Roman Notes which followed—becomes a poignant distillation of the drive which fuelled one of the twentieth century’s most poetic artistic thinkers.