Embracing the act of repetitive gestural mark making, Untitled by Cy Twombly is an expressive and deftly executed example from an idiosyncratic series of works on paper known as the Roman Notes, created in the early 1970s whilst the artist was living and working in Rome. In Untitled an array of marks and hurried smudges, composed within horizontal linear bands, replicate the perpendicular lines of a notebook. The artist created works from this series simultaneously with his landmark ‘Blackboard’ paintings, and it was during this period that the artist fully embraced the calligraphic and cursive loops that would become his signature gesture. The present work encapsulates Twombly’s inventiveness; energetically inscribed in dense hues and pigments that convey continuous revision, the present work exudes the artist’s innovative mind-to-hand process.

By the winter of 1960, Twombly and his new Italian wife – Tatiana Franchetti – had settled in an apartment in Rome; a large seventeenth-century residence on via Monserrato, near the Palazzo Farnese. By the following winter Twombly had taken up a studio in Largo del Biscione, near Campo de’Fiori, and had begun to produce works with energetic vigour. By 1966, Twombly abandoned the emotive use of colour that had defined much of his earlier output to embark upon a cycle of grey-ground works in search of a more expressive claritys . Untitled was borne out of the artist’s four-year long commitment to paintings in which terse, white scrawls and lasso-loops form powdery accents akin to chalk on a blackboard. Emphasised within Untitled, the muted purity of Twombly’s colour experiment is evident, the dark inscriptions are pronounced over the velvety ground of the sheet.

In the late ‘60s, Twombly became fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, specifically the multitude of Deluge drawings created in the later years of the Renaissance master’s life. Within these notebooks, Da Vinci concentrated his misgivings of the powerful Medici family into a series of drawings inspired by the power of water as a natural force to be feared. In Untitled, the lithe graphite strokes interspersed with flashes of bright marine blue hark back to the powerful vision of ocean waves in Da Vinci’s Deluge drawings. Just like the waves of Leonardo’s deluge, the horizontal hatchings of Untitled appear both to rise and fall with both immutable force and steady calmness. These undular associations lend a sense of infinite momentum to the work and show Twombly musing on the impact of man – in this case the gestural intervention of the artist – against the unstoppable passage of t.mes .

1971 was a particularly poignant year for Twombly. During that same year, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s Roman gallerist and close friend, died unexpectedly; her tragic death inspired the hauntingly elegiac and widely celebrated series, Nini’s Paintings. There can be no doubt that, in this context, human mortality in the face of the all-consuming passage of t.mes would have been at the forefront of Twombly’s mind during the execution of this work. In the present piece, the inevitability of passing t.mes and the shock of tragic events is expressed both in the short blips of cursive script and the elongated strokes that dominate the composition. Untitled is then a work both charged with pathos and inspired by grandiose Renaissance source material.

A stunning example of Cy Twombly’s distinguished Roman Notes, Untitled from 1971 exhibits a violently striated surface of discontinuous, erratic strokes and insistent repetition, translating onto paper the artist’s signature gesture, as liberated swirls of wax crayon merge and attenuate in a magnificent conflation of the graphic and the painterly. The formal restraint that characterised the lasso-loops of Twombly’s ‘Blackboard’ paintings here gives way to tempestuous scrawls of cerulean blue and umber that threaten to overwhelm the calmness of linear markings. The artist’s rapid hand reads like a list of thoughts, a continuous jotting of contemplation, highlighting the work’s authorship and the artist’s distinct, yet ambiguous and utterly unique, style. As the art historian Harald Szeemann once posited: “No other artist has such a gift for open-endedness… words become lines expressive of feeling, lines become tones, tones become tensions, white becomes resolution. All this happens with the flowing naturalness of handwriting… This work seems to us both primeval and innovative, like memory itself and its energies” (H. Szeemann in: Ibid., p. 12).