Artwork: © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021
Cy Twombly’s breathtaking painting Untitled of 1964 brings together in perfect concert all the spectacular drama, enveloping scale, stunning colour, sublime confluence of line and form, and sheer emotional urgency that characterise the most irresistible achievements of his prodigious oeuvre. Executed in the artist’s thirty-sixth year, this major triumph of his groundbreaking 1960s output belongs to a critical moment in his long and illustrious career. This work seems to codify and distill all of the depictive energy and creative force espoused in the nine-part Discourses on Commodus series, now held in the Guggenheim Bilbao, into a single panel. It blends the depictive ferocity of Willem de Kooning with the deep academic import of classical Rome in a manner that is idiosyncratic to Twombly.
“Everything about the paintings… above all, their permeation with antiquity and the Mediterranean world – sets them apart from the larger body of artistic theory of the latter half of this century.”
Private collects ion
Image: © Bridgeman Images
Artwork: © The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2021
Untitled precisely distils Twombly’s revolutionary idiom, combining ethereal strokes of graphite with fiery whirls of hot colour and visceral clumps of impasto to conjure the suggestion of a plethora of influence and remembrance. In contrast to paintings of the preceding 1961-63 period, which frequently took a specific Classical myth as their inspiration, Untitled embodies what Roland Barthes termed Twombly’s “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” (Roland Barthes, ‘The Wisdom of Art’ in: Nicola Del Roscio, Ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich 2002, p. 19). It is a work of art that exists in and of itself, encapsulating Heiner Bastian’s description of Twombly’s 1961-65 corpus:
Cy Twombly, Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963
Even amongst Twombly’s evocative oeuvre, Untitled stands out for its visceral composition and colour palette. On a surface level, we can discern evidence of the artist’s lived experience. For instance, his t.mes amongst the Abstract Expressionists seems apparent in this work: we can observe Mark Rothko’s sensitivity to blended colour and paint texture, and particularly Willem de Kooning’s frenetic approach to mark-making. Looking deeper, this picture taps into base human emotional response. The smeared and daubed streaks of thick red, purple, and black, allied with the urgent barely decipherable script, imbue the panel with an evocative sense of human urgency as relevant to Classical Rome as to the contemporaneous post-war mood.
(Right) Clyfford Still, Untitled, 1956, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Image: © Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala, Artwork: © City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum / DACS 2021
Twombly had first moved to Italy seven years earlier in 1957, establishing a studio in Rome that overlooked the Colosseum. In 1959 he married Tatiana Franchetti in New York, thereby formally becoming part of his wife’s Italian family. In early 1960 the couple moved into a grand new home in a seventeenth-century Palazzo on the Via di Monserrato in Rome and Twombly’s life became infused with the antiquarian splendour and sensually overwhelming experience of the heart of the city among Classical stimuli and evocative urban topography. As Nicholas Cullinan has described, “To encounter the past is to put into question the present. This sense of awe and perplexity at overlaid tenses and t.mes s and encountering places only previously known in the imagination…offered for Twombly a palimpsest of past, present and future; layered, intertwined and interpenetrating each other like archaeological strata” (Nicholas Cullinan in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern, Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, 2008, p. 74).
Concurrently Twombly’s style became increasingly visceral, with thick and florid colour enunciating Classical references, such as in the Ferragosto paintings executed in the summer of 1961. Working in his studio on Piazza del Biscione through 1962, he became more focused on mythological subjects, as demonstrated through his paintings Birth of Venus, Hero and Leander, Leda and the Swan, and Vengeance of Achilles. These thematic developments culminated at the end of 1963 with a series of works called Nine Discourses on Commodus, an epic portrait of the violently megalomaniac Roman emperor. He spent the Spring of 1964 in Greece and during July and August he worked in Castel Gardena in the Dolomites on a series of drawings which he entitled Notes from a Tower. When he returned to Rome he painted the major triptych Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later), the extraordinary second version of School of Athens, now in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the masterful Il Parnasso. It was in this context that Twombly created the present work; a crescendo of the visceral imagery, compositional economy, and graphic intelligence that define a staggering innovation and inimitable abstract aesthetic.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 2021
Artwork: © Cy Twombly Foundation
More than any other painter of his generation, Twombly captured the aesthetic of excess (though always in tension with restraint). The proto-architectural drawing along the horizon of Untitled can thus also be seen to function as a minimal theatrical set – an Apollonian backdrop – before which violently rendered paint marks perform. Its ruled lines abstractly bespeak a stepped wall or edifice; the pencil a necessary foil to bright and explosively painted oil pigment. Hand prints in various states of resolve – somet.mes s with a palm, but elsewhere dotted or dragged marks by errant fingertips – showcase Twombly’s tactile painting style. Elsewhere, these personal gestures dissolve into anonymous energetic brushstrokes, which constitute bright knots of crimson red or brilliant white. The palette utilised in Untitled can significantly be found on ancient pottery and statuary from the classical Mediterranean: bright orange and red, cobalt blue, yellow, black and white, are all pigments that archaeologists have determined originally adorned the now purest white marble statues and temples.
Pinakothek, Munich
Image: © Tarker / Bridgeman Images
By its recourse to Classical history, the immediacy of its painted finger marks, and insistently representational composition, Untitled evinces how Twombly differed from contemporary Abstract Expressionism. Nevertheless, it equally illustrates Thomas Crow’s observation that Twombly and the Abstract Expressionists were affined by having “extinguished explicit figuration the better to retain the formal characteristics of heroicizing art from the past: large scale, expansiveness of effect, the rhetoric of ambition and risk… In this sense, their art was old-fashioned in its ambition, a throwback to the seventeenth century… when art could confidently summon up belief in Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven 1996, p. 191). The immersive dimensions, arresting colour scheme, and aggressively painted surface of Untitled unmistakably convey its ambitions as a truly heroic work of art.