Cy Twombly

Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Galerie Bonnier, Geneva
Galerie & Edition S Press, Hattingen
Helga and Walter Lauffs Collection (acquired in 1973)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 1 July 2008, Lot 52
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Geneva, Galerie Bonnier, Cy Twombly - Peintures, dessins, lithographies, 1970, no. 2 (titled The Empire of Flora)
Krefeld, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Sammlung Helga und Walther Lauffs - Amerikanische und europäische Kunst der sechziger und siebziger Jahre, 1983-84, p. 125, no. 384, illustrated (titled The Empire of Flora)

Heiner Bastian, Ed., Cy Twombly, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II, 1961-1965, Berlin 1993, p. 105, no. 45, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although there is less brown and more light peach tones along the right top edge in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully capture the rich texture of the paint drips and impasto areas in the original. Condition: This work is in good condition. There is very minor undulation along the lower right edge and two small staple holes towards the top right corner, which appear to be inherent to the artist's working process. There is stable and sound craquelure to the impasto areas and a very minor loss to the impasto at the centre of the lower right quadrant. There is a repaired tear that is 3cm long towards the bottom centre which is evident under ultra violet light and two very small spots of inpainting to the impasto areas towards the bottom centre and centre left.
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Cy Twombly's superb painting, Untitled (The Empire of Flora) exhibits all the visceral mark-making, serene compositional economy, and graphic intelligence that have become synonymous with the best of his groundbreaking and inimitable oeuvre. The painting's mysterious character possesses an urgent and irresistible energy as the product of Twombly's innovation and unique abstract aesthetic. It is seminal to the artist's renowned cycle of 'Rome' paintings, which he started when he moved to that city in 1957 and which found fuller, more mature expression by the time of the present work. Indeed, this painting marks the inception of the 1961-65 period when "everything about the paintings", according to Heiner Bastian, "sets them apart from the larger body of artistic theory of the latter half of [the Twentieth] Century" (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, volume II, 1961-1965, Berlin 1993, p. 21).

The work's inscriptions reference both the Eternal City 'Roma', as the epicentre of Western legend, as well as the painting The Empire of Flora by the eighteenth-century Venetian master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, an eponymous work from the same date housed in the Marx Collection, Berlin. In 1961 Twombly had moved his studio into rented rooms on the piazza del Biscione above a cinema in an area impoverished by petty crime and at the heart of the red light district. Living in Italy enabled him to exist outside familiar contexts and his day to day world ran the full gamut of antiquarian splendour wedded to the colourful sights and smells of a living city. The exuberant and lyrical mark-making of the present work evinces the artist's infatuation with the Antique, Renaissance and Baroque majesty of his Italian environment.

The wide-ranging surface textures of Untitled (The Empire of Flora) recount the history of its haptic genesis. The contrast between the manipulation of impasto plasticity and the ethereal delicacy of the scraped and scratched canvas creates a visual dynamism and breathes variety and life into the work. Bastian has recounted the corporeality of Twombly's working process: "He smears colour on with his fingers or applies it directly from the tube onto the canvas as a physical act: colour becomes raw condition" (Heiner Bastian, Cy Twombly: Paintings, 1952-1976, Frankfurt/ Main-Berlin 1978, p. 43). While the words 'The Empire of Flora' is scrawled in the top right corner, the symphony of mysterious marks - scribbled suggestions of underwriting, looped swirls, engraved crosses, splattered, flicked and dribbled impasto, esoteric shapes and illegible graphic symbols – evades simple definition, which in turn points to the artist's core objective.

In this work Twombly analyses the nature of visual cognition and communication by investigating semiotic sign systems. By experimenting with indeterminate iconography he questions the assumptions of conventional visual vocabularies, frames of reference, and sign systems. Consequently, as the great literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes comments, "What happens on the stage Twombly offers us (whether it is canvas or paper) is something which partakes of several kinds of event" (Roland Barthes in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, 1979, p. 9). As with Twombly's best output Untitled (The Empire of Flora) mediates the boundary between figuration and abstraction, continually enticing the viewer with implied meaning and challenging the cognitive deductions inherent to signifier-referent equations.

Although Twombly interrogates the ways in which artistic transactions function, this work also initiates a powerful visual effect. As a purely abstract painting Untitled (The Empire of Flora) speaks in a very direct way, provoking the viewer with its highly animated appearance. Indeed, in many ways the painting becomes the physical manifestation of the maxim of Twombly's forerunner, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé: "Everything happens by shortcut...story telling is avoided". The absence of figurative coherence here complies with Kirk Varnedoe's description of Twombly's paintings from 1961 as being "among the most impressive, most emotionally wrought work's of Twombly's career...They reach for a higher level of lyricism, and a greater grandiloquence, precisely through their more aggressive release of explicitly defiling messiness" (Kirk Varnedoe in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1995, p. 34). 

In the same year as Untitled (The Empire of Flora) was executed, Pierre Restany discussed Twombly's paintings as being "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, 1961). Untitled (The Empire of Flora) captures the chaotic and disjointed nature of existence, and confirms Varnedoe's claim that Twombly's painting "wants exactly to convey a sense of life energy that yokes these exalted and debased domains together and makes their energies indivisible" (Kirk Varnedoe, Op. Cit., p. 34-5). Through its instinctive brilliance this work is an affirmation of the disordered vitality that runs down through the ages and binds together the histories of human experience.