Beschreibung:

Cy Twombly Untitled 1969 graphite, wax crayon, felt-tip pen and colored pencil on paper 23 x 30 3/4 in. (58.4 x 78.1 cm.)
Provenance Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Private Collection, Europe Christie's, New York, Post-War and Contemporary Art, November 11, 2010, lot 228 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Literature This work will be included in the forthcoming volume Catalogue Raisonné of Cy Twombly - Works on Paper. Catalogue Essay “It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening.” - Cy Twombly (in an interview with D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 179) A passionately gestural, erotic and dynamic combination of dramatic, freehand drawing and energetic masses of pink and black crayon and pencil, Cy Twombly’s Untitled, 1969, represents a transformative period in the artist’s career. From his emergence into the vibrant New York art world of the 1950s, Twombly’s wild, seemingly erratic paintings and drawings confounded fellow artists and critics alike, simultaneously referencing and renouncing the teachings of the New York School. Working alongside his one-time partner, Robert Rauschenberg and sharing a studio with Jasper Johns Twombly and his peers ushered into the artistic community a revitalized form of abstraction, filling canvases with thin, wavering lines, creating what the artist himself called the “…fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings, fusing projected on atmosphere.” (A. Sherwood Pundyk, "Cy Twombly: Sculpture," The Brooklyn Rail (September 2011)) Untitled, 1969, exemplifies the growing complexity and lyricism evident in the evolution of Twombly’s work throughout the 1960s. Initially concerned with the simple, linear symbolism of early tribal markings, Twombly’s early, sparse compositions reflect not only his desire to reference a past, primal simplicity of form and meaning, but also his own experience as an army cryptographer – a profession in which simple signals and symbolic devices implied a full spectrum of nuanced meaning. Delineating the genesis of Twombly’s gestural representations, Katherina Schmidt writes, “His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures. Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself.” ("Immortal and Eternally Young. Figures from classical mythology in the work of Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly", in Nicholas Cullinan (ed.), Twombly and Poussin – Arcadian Painters. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery/Paul Holberton Publishing, 2011) Freeing himself of pre-conceived artistic notions and his own learned talent, the artist sought to “…disconnect…his hand from his eye” in an unfettered, almost subconscious manner – a technique espoused by contemporary Willem de Kooning (J. Lawrence, "Cy Twombly's Cryptic Nature," in Cy Twombly Works from the Sonnabend Collection, London and New York, p. 13) Nowhere is Twombly’s freehand “script” more apparent than in the present work, in which an enlivened and intimate language leaps forth from the paper, inviting us to engage the artist’s forms in our own connotative dialogue of representation. Incorporating these numeric, figurative and literal devices into his work with increased fervor as the 1960s drew to a close, Twombly maintained a continuity of allusion to mythological and literary figures past, even as he eschewed traditional practice. From his relocation to Italy in 1957, the artist began an exploration of antiquity, its themes and contemporary relevance, that would characterize much of his work over the next decade. In Untitled, 1969, explicitly erotic renderings of a succession of female breasts, drawn as though moving through the picture, are punctuated by phallic figures encroaching upon the central