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Lot 6
Cy Twombly (1928-2011)
Untitled
Closed27 June 2012
Price Realised
GBP 713,250
More Information
Specialist note
'From a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning it's more like I am having an experience than making a picture'
(C. Twombly interview with David Sylvester quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 14).
Cy Twombly's Untitled is a serene and beautifully realised example of the artist's celebrated gestural abstraction. Rendered in white, the work proliferates with lyrical but wordless writing, the soft indigo crayon meandering across the virgin, painted surface. Created at the same time as Twombly's landmark Blackboard series, Untitled translates onto card the period's distinctive intermingling of layers, the liberated swirls of wax crayon overlapping and interacting with one another. Washes of white paint partially obscure passages of cursive script, leaving hand-written traces like shadows of history or lost memory.
In Untitled, the freedom and sensitivity of Twombly's composition appears to reveal the ruminations of the artist's mind. Recalling the immediacy and spontaneity of Jackson Pollock's all-over action painting, the artist's writing 'has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life'(P. Restany quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 19). In spite of the work's apparent formal simplicity, it offers a morass of emotion and human sensation.
(C. Twombly interview with David Sylvester quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 14).
Cy Twombly's Untitled is a serene and beautifully realised example of the artist's celebrated gestural abstraction. Rendered in white, the work proliferates with lyrical but wordless writing, the soft indigo crayon meandering across the virgin, painted surface. Created at the same time as Twombly's landmark Blackboard series, Untitled translates onto card the period's distinctive intermingling of layers, the liberated swirls of wax crayon overlapping and interacting with one another. Washes of white paint partially obscure passages of cursive script, leaving hand-written traces like shadows of history or lost memory.
In Untitled, the freedom and sensitivity of Twombly's composition appears to reveal the ruminations of the artist's mind. Recalling the immediacy and spontaneity of Jackson Pollock's all-over action painting, the artist's writing 'has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life'(P. Restany quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 19). In spite of the work's apparent formal simplicity, it offers a morass of emotion and human sensation.