Cy Twombly

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York 

Robert Rauschenberg, New York

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1995 

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Houston, The Menil Collection; Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; and Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1994-95, p. 128, no. 71, illustrated (New York); and p. 138, no. 71, illustrated (Berlin)

Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Hamburg, Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Stiftung Froehlich: Sammlungsblöcke, 1996-97, p. 186, no. 252, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Gallery, on loan to the collection, 1999 

Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst im ZKM, Werke aus den Sammlungen FER, Froehlich, Grässlin, Weishaupt, 1999-2000 

Nicola del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 4, 1964-1969, Munich 2014, p. 174, no. 202, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in several places. There is some glue residue from the tape that has discoloured. Further inspection reveals two small specks of media accretion: one 30cm from the bottom edge and 5cm from the left hand edge, and one towards the bottom left corner tip.
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Charged with libidinal expressiveness and consumed by graphic priapic detail, Cy Twombly’s sensuous work Untitled forms part of a small series of exquisite works on paper created on Captiva Island in the winter of 1968. Taking as a departure a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomic study The Hemisection of a Man and Woman in the Act of Coition, circa 1492, collaged to the top of the work, Twombly enters into a mesmerising artistic and intellectual dialogue with the Renaissance polymath that reveals all of his artistic potency and compositional prowess. A discourse with the past transposed into a contemporary vision lies at the very core of Twombly’s oeuvre. Responding to Leonardo’s unique blending of scientific rigour and formal beauty, Twombly’s line drawings constitute an idiosyncratic poetic retort that oscillates between pronounced detail and a whirling sea of abstracting forms. The importance of the present work is emphasised by its rich exhibition history and impressive provenance; the first owner was Twombly’s close friend, companion, and important influence, the artist Robert Rauschenberg. Indeed, Untitled is situated at a seminal point in Twombly’s career and combines the compositional stringency of his famed Blackboard series with the gestural exuberance of the celebrated corpus of Bolsena paintings that would emerge a few months later.

Twombly’s reiteration of the coital act in the present work is consumed by the physical properties of pure form, some even too abstract to relate to any anatomic specificity. His juxtaposition of drastic figuration and evocative abstraction echoes Leonardo’s study and the two works gradually fuse into one, both compositionally and aesthetically. Twombly often only repeats the progression of the line with several intervals through which the visual constructs achieve autonomy of space and movement. This is reinforced by the taped collage elements that emphasise the processual genesis of the work. In the meticulous observation of the human body in motion and the lyrical feel of marks, scrawls, scribbles, doodles, and scratches sprawled across the work, these intimate works on paper recall one of Twombly’s pivotal series, Treatise on the Veil created between 1968 and 1971. Similar to this series, an amalgam of symbols such as figure-of-eight infinity signs, parabolic curves and alphabetical letters suffuses the present work and contrasts the swirling and expressive gesture of both Twombly’s and Leonardo’s drawing line. All of these symbols are recurring motifs in Twombly’s oeuvre however the mathematic signs particularly resonate with Leonardo’s interest in the golden ratio, a concept that refers to the harmonic ratio of two quantities. This mathematic concept is particularly resonant with regard to the human body as an adult’s midpoint is at the genitals with the navel approximating the golden section. The pudenda thus become the centre point of the human body when entering adulthood and as the origin of life, they are celebrated in the present work with an explosive outburst of gestural lines, linguistic elements, and numerical equations.

The first indication of Leonardo’s entry into Twombly’s pantheon of immediate influences was To Leonardo from 1960, in which the influence of Leonardo’s scattered drawings, geometric signs, and passages of mirror-script writing can be detected in Twombly’s aesthetic. In the series of works from Captiva Island, Twombly’s interest in Leonardo’s studies of nature and anatomy becomes even more evident. Each drawing is part of a larger continuum that extends beyond the drawing itself; not so much as an actual extension of the drawing beyond its borders but as an open continuum of thought processes. Similar to poetry, the penetrating power and vigour of Twombly’s drawings can be read ‘between the lines’. In Untitled, the reciprocal dialogue with Leonardo’s anatomic study opens up a veritable deluge of associations about the context of Renaissance aesthetics in contemporary painting, the human body in the instant of creation, and the seeming dichotomy between abstraction and figuration.