I n Cy Twombly’s Roman Notes, formal restraint gives way to tempestuous scrawls that swell, peak, and resolve with visceral urgency across the surface of the paper in waves of raw, kinetic energy. Executed in 1970, the offset lithographs emerged from a pivotal moment in Twombly’s mature practice; simultaneously creating his landmark blackboard paintings, it was during this period that the artist fully embraced the calligraphic scribbles which would become the signature gesture of his groundbreaking artistic aesthetic. A testament to the sublime beauty and historical import of the present work, Roman Notes has remained in Tamotsu Yagi’s collection for over three decades. Resolutely reconciling the gap between literature and painting, text and form, Roman Notes approaches the boundaries of lexical cognition, but ultimately denies logic and legibility, instead pursuing a more immediate and direct means of communication.
“Unreadable missives…are their own category in Twombly’s art, the 'writing' that isn’t just imagined by the viewer, but named by the artist, one that calls to poets and writers with the seduction of all that could be said but isn’t. That never will be. These signs without attachments. Is this a love letter or one of pleading for forgiveness? Is this a note about the weather in Rome or the hunger for flesh? Is this for us or for another?”
Roman Notes bespeaks Twombly's renowned dialogue with the classical past and the deep inspiration he drew from Rome's historically saturated landscape. With his first visit to the Italian city in the early 1950s, Twombly was immediately captivated by ancient forms of graffiti that he saw on the exteriors of historical Roman ruins, the influence of which is clearly discernible in the graffiti-like scrawls translated in Roman Notes. Twombly’s visits to Rome also cultivated his fascination with and knowledge of the erudite texts of Roman and Greek antiquity. He was especially drawn to the meticulous notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, called Codices, within which the artist recorded his scientific observations of the natural world through nearly illegible writings and graphic drawings. Twombly saw within the Renaissance master's scientific formulas, 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. By 1959, Twombly had moved to Rome, where he developed his highly personal, cryptic style of poetic "handwriting" that was imbued with the grandeur and decadence of the Mediterranean world. Twombly's graphic language became visual poetry, “as full of ambiguity as life itself... Twombly's 'writing' has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life, its murmuring penetrating to the very depths of things” (Pierre Restany, The Revolution of the Sign, Paris 1961, n.p.). Fully evident in Roman Notes, Twombly embraces an abstract visual language all his own, evading direct translation in favor of pure visual sensation.
“I have always thought 'Twombly' ought to be (if it isn’t already) a verb, as in twombly: (vt): to hover thoughtfully over a surface, tracing glyphs and graphs of mischievous suggestiveness, periodically touching down amidst discharges of passionate intensity. Or then again, perhaps a noun, as in twombly (n.): A line with a mind of its own."
Lyrical scribbles here unfold across six sheets of paper in loosely delineated, horizontal bands of blue ink. Surrounded by washes of pale yellow and green, the strokes seemingly hover above the page, yearning to burst forth from the picture plane. Twombly’s scribbles recall the formulaic Palmer method, a strict approach to teaching cursive handwriting in which schoolchildren were forced to repeatedly rewrite words and phrases, such that the simple gestures of putting pencil to paper became a form of internalized bodily discipline. Imitating yet denouncing these punishing typological drills, Twombly’s gestures move gracefully across the sheets with a rhythmic cadence unhampered by traditional techniques and assumptions. Twombly revels in the experience of the eye disassociated from the hand which occurs when the artist is allowed to fully “de-skill” himself. He resolutely leaves behind any didactic meaning of his own intervention, abandoning the safe haven of mythological symbols and reverting to the most primal usage of the line as an almost naïve yet extremely potent transmitter of space, duration, and motion. As explained by Heiner Bastian: “Twombly tries to shatter form as well as its concomitant intellectual and narrative history in a kind of relativism, reducing it to a rationality of 'black and white' that is at the same time the structural sum of all movement" (Heiner Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III 1966-1971, Munich 1994, p. 23).
Like the work of Minimalist artists who pursued a repetitive, doggedly systematic task—such as Yayoi Kusama’s looped Infinity Nets, Sol LeWitt’s serial wall drawings, or Agnes Martin’s graphite grids—Twombly experiments with the unplanned personal inflections that can arise from following strict conventions, a departure from ideals of purely spontaneous expression. At moments, Twombly’s line is tight and dense; at others, the cursive energy drives off course, a high-speed, carefully charted choreography in which individual events of personal expression are channeled into a greater whole. Within this opposition lies the very brilliance of Twombly’s practice: reveling in the contradictions between the systematic and the irregular, the unruly and the cerebral, the premeditated and the intuitive, he achieves a balletic complexity unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. An exquisite example of this potency, Roman Notes evinces the artist’s mastery, translating the vivacious visual language for which he is best known on a sublime expanse.
