塞·托姆布雷

Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Frigerio Collection, Lecco
Galleria del Naviglio, Milan
Galleria Notizie, Turin
Acquired by the present owner from the above circa 1975

Turin, Galleria Notizie, Cy Twombly, May - June 1963, p. 10, illustrated

Heiner Bastian, ed., Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume I 1948-1960, Munich, 1992, cat. no. 150, p. 244, illustrated

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a metal strip frame with painted white float.
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.
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Executed over half a century ago, Cy Twombly's sumptuously textured Untitled engages the viewer with a pure painterly energy that is both confrontational and seductive. It stands at the precipice of a 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, Mosel 1993, p. 21)  Illustrated in Bastian’s 1992 catalogue raisonné, yet unseen for forty years since it has resided in the same Private European collection, Untitled is seminal to Twombly's renowned canon of paintings initiated after he moved permanently to Rome in 1957. Living abroad allowed Twombly to experience sensual release and exist beyond the constraints of familiar contexts. This is abundantly evidenced in the present work where surges of cream impasto and flecked drips of paint overlay the white ground beneath, simultaneously concealing and revealing the exuberant and lyrical mark-making in lead pencil. The suggestions of the forms, always threatening to breach the threshold between figuration and abstraction, evoke the artist's infatuation with the Antique, Renaissance and Baroque majesty of his new Italian environment, which was so far removed from the downtown Manhattan loft life he had walked away from. Here, the insinuation of a five-fingered hand reached out into the painting towards the lower left forges a tantalizing link to the authorial hand of the artist. Like a stenciled hand from an ancient cave painting, this semi-figurative motif ties the raw corporeality of the oil paint strata to the artist’s residual shadow.


In this work Twombly's innovation and inimitable abstract aesthetic coalesce with visceral mark making, and serene compositional economy. Most immediately striking is the painting's intuitive design, which is at once so instinctive and seemingly arbitrary, yet also deeply satisfying on a formal level. The balance achieved between the corporeal manipulation of impasto plasticity and the ethereal delicacy of the pencil marks on the primed canvas creates a highly seductive duality. Indeed, the variegated surface of Untitled becomes almost like an archaeological excavation, and the canvas itself becomes almost a sculptural object. In this respect there is some parity with that other great artistic innovator concurrently working in Italy, Lucio Fontana, and especially to his Olii canvases where material is similarly manipulated, scraped and incised to achieve a suspended three-dimensionality. While Twombly’s sophisticated transmutation of figurative motifs and expressionistic abstraction conceptually differed from Fontana’s Spatialism, both artists sought to undermine the pristine flatness of the picture plane, and thereby interrogate the boundaries of a painted canvas, so that which was considered interior might become exterior.


The present work is also a mesmerizing example of Twombly's pioneering interrogation of semiotic sign systems and accords strongly with Roland Barthes observation that "What happens on the stage Twombly offers us (whether it is canvas or paper) is something which partakes of several kinds of event." (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, 1979, p. 9)  Akin to Twombly's best output, Untitled continually entices the viewer with implied meaning and challenging the deductions inherent to signifier-referent equations. While the darkest vase-shaped element towards the bottom center proposes various interpretations, particularly of silhouettes rooted in Classicism, the outstretched “hand” symbol is rich with cognitive associations. Twombly's disavowal of assumption in this work echoes the maxim of his forerunner, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé: "Everything happens by shortcut...story telling is avoided".


Kirk Varnedoe has described that during the period leading up to this painting in 1960, Twombly was very anxious that his mark-making may have been becoming decorative. Indeed, despite striving for "a wilfully uningratiating originality...the risk of a mannerism...the devil of virtuosity...the sparse linearity could, if unpressured, err into vitiating elegance." (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, 1995, p. 34)  As a reaction against this perceived tendency, in 1961 Twombly obliterated these traits completely and created paintings that are, according to Varnedoe, "among the most impressive, most emotionally wrought works 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." (Ibid. p. 34) The scattering of haptic marks in Untitled exactly signposts this release and comprises Twombly's self-abandonment to the unadulterated powers of his creation.


At about the time of this work Pierre Restany discussed Twombly's paintings "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)  Ultimately the mark-making of Untitled stands as the fully evolved incarnation of the chaotic and disjointed nature of existence itself. In discussing the "cultural grandeur" and "bodily physicality" characteristic of this series, Varnedoe declares 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., pp. 34-5)