BENJAMIN PROUST FINE ART LIMITED

London

CY TWOMBLY Lexington 1928 – Rome 2011

UNTITLED

1976

Graphite, oil pastel, collage on paper 140 x 100 cm Inscribed and dated 76

Provenance: Galleria Sperone, Rome Collection Angelo Baldassarre, Bari

Exhibited: Rome, Galleria Sperone, Cy Twombly, 1976

43-44 New Bond Street London - W1S 2SA +44 7500 804 504 VAT: 126655310 dd [email protected] Company n° 7839537 www.benjaminproust.com Literature: Yvon Lambert, Ed., Cy Twombly: Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier de Cy Twombly, Milan 1979, Vol VI, p. 184, no. 202, illustrated

“LACON: An acorn husk falls short of wild apples taste; the one is sour, the other honey sweet”

Theocritus (3rd Century BC), Idyll V, in: Anthony Holden, trans., Greek Pastoral Poetry, London 1974, p. 68

Twombly's art occupies a very distinct position in the history of painting. It has associations, through friendships and influences, that are unusual and unconventional. It evokes reactions, even amongst those well-versed in post-war abstraction, that cover an enormous range of positions. It doesn't easily connect to the work of his American peers, yet it never becomes fully European. His paintings are the work of an artist whose path is his own.

That path began in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, and took him, via Boston, to New York. In both cities, he was exposed to a vast range of ideas and work, from the European Expressionists (he recalled early admiration for both Lovis Corinth and Oskar Kokoschka), through Dada and Surrealism, to the cutting edge of Abstract Expressionism. Yet he also threw his net wider, absorbing himself in study of the arts of Mexico and Africa: "I'm drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements, to the symmetrical plastic order...".1

New York gave him not only the great museums to haunt, but also the commercial galleries. In his 2007 interview with Nicholas Serota for his 2008 Tate Modern retrospective, Twombly recalled seeing work by major European figures such as Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti and Paul Klee as a foil to his exposure to his American contemporaries; "In New York I lived in galleries...I hardly ever went to school.".2

His friendship with Robert Rauschenberg brought him into contact with Black Mountain College in North Carolina, at the time one of the more avant-grade arts establishments in the USA. As well as studying here with Franz Kline, an experience that would be reflected in his very early paintings, Twombly also developed friendships with composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.

In 1952, Twombly and Rauschenberg travelled to Europe and North Africa, the immediate effect on his work being that the colour white was to assume an importance in his work that it would rarely veer from. By 1957, Twombly was in Rome, a city which would become his home and base for the rest of his life. Absenting himself from the New York scene allowed the artist to develop his painting style away from the obvious comparisons of his own generation of Americans and the romance and history of the ancient city clearly appealed to him. Rome in the 1950s was recovering from the traumas of WWII and the artists and writers of the city were carving their own place in the modern world. Artists like Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana explored and challenged the space and materials of painting, whilst others such as Piero Manzoni questioned the very nature of art itself. For an artist like Twombly, the effect was mesmerising; "If I went to Rome now, I wouldn't spend two days. But when I went I was in paradise.".3

Having always responded to stimuli wider than just painting, the landscape, architecture and culture of Italy was as food to a starving man. The paintings almost immediately began to

1 The artist, from a travel grant application, 1952 and quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, 'Inscriptions in Arcadia', The Essential Cy Twombly, London 2014, p.79-80 2 The artist, in conversation with Nicholas Serota, Rome 2007 3 The artist, in conversation with David Sylvester, Rome 2000 exhibit a space, an expansiveness that enhances the images and assisted his journey towards bringing sensation and feeling to his work without having to define an image via painterly means to express those same sensations. His repertoire of mark-making grew rapidly in these early years in Europe and began to include strongly calligraphic elements, incorporating words and phrases inscribed across the paintings. This allowed him to draw on an immense treasure house of the wider arts to evoke both public and private signs within his painting, as well as suggesting a connection with the common language of the streets and a casting off of an overly 'art' aesthetic.

It is this use of language and its ability to provoke our own senses that is at the heart of Untitled, 1976. The quotation that dominates the lower portion of the painting is from the Idyll V of Theocritus, and is one line from the song contest that the author gives to his two main characters, Lacon, a shepherd, and Comatas, a goatherd. Writing in the later 3rd century BC, Theocritus' work is one of the defining elements in a form of pastoral writing that echoes throughout history to the present day. His two-part poetic dialogues, often with underlying themes of love, were reinvigorated by writers such as Petrarch in the early Renaissance, and their influence on English writers such as Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe in the sixteenth century created a form of bucolic romance that still strikes a chord. Twombly's choice of this single line from Lacon's dialogue offers a deceptively simple gateway for the viewer into a world of otherness, of choice and alternatives, where the sweet and the sour are placed before us as signifiers of our own choices. The poetry of the line, too, seeps slowly into us, carrying the viewer away to a place other than the here and now.

Painted in 1976, this work connects us to the period when Twombly was restoring a decayed house in Bassano, a little north of Rome. The area was then still rustic, and shepherds, like the modern day Lacon, would pass the studio, the bells tinkling on their charges as they moved along the hillside. Like Poussin, another hero of the artist ('I would have liked to be Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time')4, Twombly is able to gather the seeds of a romantic notion from another time, and plant them firmly in our own.

Writers on Twombly often fall back on language associated with disciplines other than painting when they come to describe his work. Terms from architecture, archeology and literature feature often, yet they seem to ultimately fail to capture the sense of translation of a starting point, be that a landscape or place, a line of text or an image, via a technique that is as immediate and varied as language itself. This connection of the actual image and what Roland Barthes described as "the bait of a meaning"5 through the titles and inscriptions the artist uses sets the viewer on a path of discovery, a labyrinthine path certainly, through paintings which "...awaken an idea of visibility that the picture fulfils in a very different way."6.

4 The artist in conversation with Nicholas Serota, Rome 2007 5 Roland Barthes, "The Wisdom of Art", in Nicola Del Roscio (ed.), Writings on Cy Twombly, Munich 2002, p.106 6 Gottfried Boehm, "Mnemosyne. Zur Kategorie des erinnerden Sehens", in Gottfried Boehm, Karlheinz Stierle, Gundolf Winter (eds.), Modernitat und Tradition. Festschrift fur Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag, Munich, 1985, p.54