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CY TWOMBLY (b. 1928) UNTITLED (BOLSENA) oil-based house paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas ...
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Category:Everything Else / Other
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Estimated At:2,500,000.00 - 3,500,000.00 USD
NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00USD+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2002 Nov 11 @ 16:00UTC-8 : PST/AKDT
CY TWOMBLY
(b. 1928)
UNTITLED (BOLSENA)
oil-based house paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas
79 x 94 3/4 in. (200.7 x 240.5 cm)
executed in 1969 <p>PROVENANCE
Galerie Art in Progress, MUNICH
Galerie Neuendorf, HAMBURG
Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, COLOGNE
Saatchi Collection, LONDON
Galerie Karsten Greve, PARIS <p>EXHIBITED
DÜSSELDORF, Städtische Kunsthalle and BADEN-BADEN, Stattliche Kunsthalle, SURREALITÄT-BILDREALITÄT 1924-1974. IN DEN UNZÄHILGEN BILDERN DES LEBENS, December 8, 1974-February 2, 1975, no. 366,
p. 153 (illustrated)
MUNICH, Galerie Art in Progress, CY TWOMBLY: GREY PAINTINGS + GOUACHES, March 6-April 14, 1975, no. 1 (illustrated)
LONDON, The Saatchi Collection, DONALD JUDD, BRICE MARDEN, CY TWOMBLY, ANDY WARHOL, March-October, 1985
LONDON, The Tate Gallery, PAST PRESENT FUTURE: A NEW DISPLAY OF THE COLLECTION, 1990
PARIS, Galerie Karsten Greve, CY TWOMBLY. PEINTURES, Ĺ’UVRES SUR PAPIER ET SCULPTURES, May 29-October 20, 1993 <p>LITERATURE
R. Rosenblum, "Cy Twombly," ART OF OUR TIME. THE SAATCHI COLLECTION, 1984, Vol. 2, pl. 67, n.p., comm. p. 27
P. Schjeldahl, "Painter's Painter," INTERVIEW, July 1993, p. 29 (illustrated)
H. Bastian, ed., CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE PAINTINGS, VOLUME III, 1966-1971, pp. 178-179, no. 79 (illustrated)
In 1966, Cy Twombly embarked on a long series of gray paintings that are commonly considered the most daring and original works of his career. As the present canvas demonstrates, Twombly renounced the baroque flourishes of bright color that appeared in his work of the early 1960s, and instead produced spare, white scribbles on dark, muted grounds. Despite their whispering quietude, these canvases announced a dramatic break with the heritage of Abstract Expressionism. First presented to the New York art world in 1967, Twombly's gray paintings were welcomed into the cool climate of Minimalism, and presciently anticipated the rise of Conceptual art in the following decade.
For obvious reasons, Twombly's gray paintings have often been referred to as "blackboard paintings." These large rectangular canvases, painted in deep shades of gray, green, and black, closely approximate the expansive chalkboards found in classrooms throughout the world. Fittingly, Twombly covered these dark monochromes with graphic strokes of a white wax crayon. The results often resemble handwriting exercises, the cursive efforts of a young child learning to communicate for the first time. As Kirk Varnedoe has explained of the series as a whole, "These are 'signature' images in several senses - because they ostensibly present an abstracted, wordless essence of the handwriting that is associated with so much of Twombly's work; and because they vividly embody, again and in renewed form, the artist's willingness to take on the most unpromising premises as the basis of his art.... In Twombly's case, the adoption of the idling run-on scroll is consistent, in the terms of a very different aesthetic, with the earlier decision to enlarge and use his signature as an expressive element. Then, he had unmoored a legibly meaningful but formulaic piece of language and pulled it back into the realm of abstraction; now, he took something prior to language, the unformed exercise of proto-handwriting, and pushed it up to a communicating role. In both instances, as indeed in a great deal of modern art
previously, the artist takes what others see as inert and merely instrumental adjuncts to creativity - wrap-up conventions or warm-up exercises - and proposes them as the principal drama of art" (Kirk Varnedoe, "Inscriptions in Arcadia" CY TWOMBLY: A RETROSPECTIVE, exh. cat., New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994, pp. 41-42).
While their resemblance to chalky scrawls of handwriting is certainly apparent, several of Twombly's gray paintings also offer meditations on invisible ideas. Like several similar works residing in the permanent collection of the Dia Center for the Arts, the present canvas appears to chart a series of horizontal measurements. One notes how the artist's thin, nervous line starts, stops, then starts again, and is interrupted by vague numerical notations both above and below. Here Twombly seems to be graphing spatial distances or, perhaps, the passage of time. These cryptic calculations may derive inspiration from the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, which Twombly studied while living and working in Italy. These same marks lend an engrossing visual substance to abstract ideas, and thus heralded the style and practices of much Conceptual art in 1970s.
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