Cy Twombly

Christie's, New York, May 9, 1984, Lot 250
Marisa del Re Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1988

This work is in excellent condition. The sheet is laid down to stretched canvas with black tape on all four edges of the stretcher. There are areas of very minor wear to the sheet at the lower right corner and a soft 1 ½" horizontal crease in the upper right corner. There is a very fine intermittent 14" vertical hairline crack extending up from the bottom edge, which most likely occurred prior to mounting. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The work is framed in a warm brown wood frame with a float painted black.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"Handwriting has become for Twombly the means of beginning again, of erasing the Baroque culmination of the painting of the early 1960s...beautiful writing has been submerged within a Jasper Johns-like gray field."
Robert Pincus-Witten, "Learning to Write," 1968, in Nicola del Roscio, ed., Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich, 2002, p. 56

Pulsating with the expansions and contractions of Cy Twombly's inimitable mark-making, Untitled of 1971 broadcasts a vital and irresistible energy. The current of its urgent linearity courses through semi-determinate bands which imply the structure of typography yet remain resolutely illegible. The rolling sweeps of looping mark-making cover the sheet to deny any central compositional motif or subject matter. The act of erasure and over-drawing dramatically destabilizes the legibility of handwriting and the cipher of language held therein. Twombly's line repeatedly nears the precipice of lexical recognition with suggestive echoes of conventional pictographs such as figure-of-eight infinity signs and nascent parabolic curves as well as alphabetical letters. However, ultimately any prescribed attributions of sign referents are overruled by the physical properties of pure form. Aggregations of Twombly's partially-erased, smeared and overwritten scrawls accumulate like geological strata: mnemonic shadows narrating successive past acts of creation. The resultant composition is an unremittingly free association between painting and language, becoming a distinctly lyrical form of abstraction and, quite simply, the archetype of sublime visual poetry. Accessing a myriad of responses that are at once intellectual and emotional, visual and psychological, Untitled stands as a total work of art; a conceptual and aesthetic gesamtkunstwerk that achieves an unprecedented universality. With the unsophisticated rawness of illegible graffiti Twombly invents a transcendent new visual language to interrogate both the most elementary and the most sophisticated concerns posed by the genesis of creativity.

An archetypal work on paper of the esteemed Blackboard series, this sublime drawing represents Twombly’s departure from extraneous literary and historical inspiration as he sought to channel the vitality of his wrist towards exploring the expressive possibilities of autonomous rhythmic repetitions. The process of drawing for Twombly embodied the paradox of time and the convergence of many seemingly dissimilar elements into a single composition disclosing the intricacies of his profound visionary awareness. In the present work, we are witness to the sheer immediacy of Twombly’s gesture, as declared by Kirk Varnedoe: "Twombly all but abandoned the paintbrush in order to elide - with the pencil point, a broader graphite-rubbing stroke, and wax crayon - any remaining distinction between painting and drawing." (Kirk Varnedoe in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Cy Twombly – A Retrospective, 1994, p. 20) The reduction of form to its most elegant and elementary essence in Untitled seduces the viewer into the hidden complexity and depth of the image.