Belonging to the artist’s iconic series of ‘Blackboard’ paintings created between 1968 and 1971, Cy Twombly’s Untitled of 1970 reflects a period of great convergence in post-war art. The titanic modes of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art proposed competing philosophies for the grand trajectory of progressive innovation; herein Twombly’s reverberating and now iconic loops atop expressive grounds refract these overlapping spheres of influence. Many works in this series comparable in scale and execution belong to the world’s most renowned museums and institutions, including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Benesse House Museum, Naoshima. However, unlike every other 'Blackboard' painting that bears white loops on a grey ground, the rare umber and dark grey marks here juxtapose frenetic mark-making with a sense of calm serenity also evocative of the drawings of the High Renaissance.

In the present work seven majestic horizontal bands of loops increase in volume and expressive abandon as the artist progressed down the length of the canvas –Twombly’s lassoed lines herein lose regularity and control. A seemingly frenzied dispersion of graphic mark-making is in fact the result of finely-honed technical precision: the march of elliptical repetitions is expertly rendered to achieve an irresistibly hypnotic urgency. This stark, graphic linearity cascades across a highly seductive pale ground rendered through a forceful assault of brushwork. The variegated tonal architecture of light grisaille hues functions like geological strata, having trapped within its oil layers the shadows of drips, smears and strokes. With all the rough, fractured rawness of street graffiti, in these works Twombly presented an entirely novel visual language that innovatively explores both the most elementary and the most sophisticated concerns posed by the genesis of creativity.

Twombly’s series of 'Blackboard' paintings – as they would come to be known following Robert Pincus-Witten’s seminal text in 1968 – revived the artist’s career following a troubling period in the early part of the decade. In 1966, the artist abandoned the emotive use of colour that had defined much of his earlier output to embark upon a cycle of grey canvases in search of a more expressive clarity. Extraneous literary and historical concerns were cast aside as Twombly sought to channel the vitality of his wrist towards exploring the expressive possibilities of autonomous rhythmic repetitions. He was fascinated by the musical theory of Counterpoint, Palmer handwriting drills, André Masson's automatic drawing and Paul Klee's Pedagogical exercises. The repetition of forms also recalls Futurist investigations into the photographic and cinematic decomposition of forms in motion, such as those exemplified in Umberto Boccioni's States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, and indeed by others such as Marcel Duchamp's with his kinetic Nude Descending a Staircase. Owing inspirational debt to the scientific notebook drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Twombly saw within the Renaissance master's innumerable scientific formula, scattered drawings and codes, a private poetry of obsession; something driven by an irrational demon of secret knowledge which struck a chord with Twombly's own aesthetic. Indeed, the colour and tone of the present work with its faint umber and deep-red lines evoking high Renaissance works on paper or the cartoons of such masters as Leonardo, emphasises this influential debt. Above all though, perhaps it was the realization that the Renaissance clarity and light so often used to describe Italian art were balanced by a darker, neurotic intensity. This is reflected by the destructive and turbulent themes of Leonardo's work to which Twombly was consistently drawn in the late 1960s: those of maelstroms and cataclysms.

When Leonardo da Vinci painted his whirlwinds, storms, and floods, he sought to capture a subject that could be written about but was nearly impossible to be painted. Da Vinci’s cataclysms and maelstroms were a considerable influence for Twombly’s all-engulfing abstraction, a muscular study of colossal light and shadow that in its tempestuous intensity evokes Da Vinci’s sublime storms. Suzanne Delehanty describes the critical moment in Twombly’s practice which brought forth this career defining body of work: “Around 1967-1968, Twombly isolated the abstraction of movement, whether at rest or in motion, and its coefficient, space-time; the passionate centrifugal motion of Galatea is transformed into the supreme poetry of movement which intrigued Leonardo throughout his life… It is as if Twombly entered Leonardo’s mind to envision the affinities between natural and human processes – to see the drawn line, like a natural phenomenon, unfold in space and time.” (Suzanne Delehanty, "The Alchemy of Mind and Hand" in Nicola del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, p. 68) The painting reflects the artist’s supreme introspection and affinity for draftsmanship, here magnified through an exceptional scope.

Following Twombly’s work as a cryptographer in the United States Army, it is clear from the nature of his early mark-making that he was fundamentally captivated by terms of visual communication and determined to interrogate associative sign systems and Saussurian semiotics. According to the black and white paintings of the later 1950s, he was evidently drawn to boundaries between the figurative and the abstract, following the course of Picasso and de Kooning in charting an individualistic lens onto the natural world around us. His breakthrough in 1959 with Poems to the Sea, executed in a sudden cathartic outpouring in Italy, demonstrated his definitive debt to the great lessons of history, with European Antiquity and the Renaissance proving the ultimate benchmark and springboard to his art thence forth. This grand inquiry into the past was continued through the ecstatic Baroque paintings of the early 1960s, ultimately culminating with the cycle Nine Discourses on Commodus (Guggenheim Bilbao Museo), completed in the winter of 1963 following Twombly's return from an extended trip to Egypt, Sudan, and Italy. This group of nine canvases based on the murder of the Roman emperor Aurelius Commodus was shown in New York in 1964; the exhibition was received by scathing critical reviews, after which Twombly severely slowed his production. The artist made only 20 canvases in 1964 and none in 1965 – a period of radically halted output from which the artist later emerged with a cycle of phenomenal grey-ground paintings.

Twombly found, in the relative coolness of these works, an appropriate pathway to pursue in New York. From 1968, working between Rome and New York, from studios on the Bowery and Canal Street, the relative chasteness and severity of his new aesthetic compared to the sensual pleasures of his Roman works of the early 1960s seemed more in sync with contemporary trends in America. This series ushered in a rediscovered Americanness in Twombly’s work, reflecting the contemporary artistic discourse in marked contrast to the Europeanness of his earlier works. In Untitled and the greater series of Blackboard paintings, the freedom of movement evokes the liberal energy of Jackson Pollock's action painting, while the all-over but low-pressure imagery is similar to Jasper Johns’ grey paintings. The immersive nature of vast canvas expanses and, as critically and uniquely broadcast in the present work, submersion in the force of colour, afforded an experience comparable to that generated by Rothko and Newman. The pared-down aesthetic of this painting and an unobtrusive cool objectivity also owes a significant debt to the protagonists of Minimalism including Judd, Andre and Flavin. Nonetheless, in its lightness, use of deep umber against an expressive light grey ground, the present painting appears to occupy both artistic camps – linking a dialogue between Rome and New York. The methodologies and influence of the High Renaissance here meets the cool refinement of Minimalism and gestural abandon of Abstract Expressionism.

To articulate the inexplicable: this is what Cy Twombly set out to do, in paintings that consecrate the sublime visual poetry of that which cannot be written. With the obsessively systematic repetition of his Blackboard paintings and the present work, Twombly lyrically expresses both a ceaseless effort and persistent inability to depict an emotion that is quite simply beyond representation.