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CY TWOMBLY (b. 1928) UNTITLED (ROME) signed, titled, and dated "Cy Twombly Roma 1961" along the l...
Currency:USD
Category:Everything Else / Other
Start Price:NA
Estimated At:2,000,000.00 - 2,500,000.00 USD
NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00USD+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 May 15 @ 19:00UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT
CY TWOMBLY
(b. 1928)
UNTITLED (ROME)
signed, titled, and dated
"Cy Twombly Roma 1961"
along the lower edge
graphite, oil paint, house paint and crayon on canvas
403/8 x 583/8 in. (102.6 x 148.4 cm)
executed in 1961
ESTIMATE: $2,000,000-2,500,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection
Galleria La Tartaruga, ROME
Galerie Klewan, MUNICH
LITERATURE
H. Bastian, CY TWOMBLY: CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE PAINTING, Vol. II, MUNICH, 1993, p.103 (illustrated)
Painted in 1961, Untitled (Rome) is a masterful evocation of space and light in its ethereal quality, which epitomizes Cy Twombly's work of this period, since his permanent move to Rome in 1957. Twombly's unique language of gesture and form, and wistfully scrawled poetry are simultaneously suggestive and evasive in nature. It is his work, after 1957, which is strongly influenced by the Mediterranean culture, its language, myths, history, art and poetry. This Mediterranean influence brought out strong luminosity in Twombly's paintings, as well as the scribbled, non-objective line free of association, that dissolves into symbols; this signage becoming an ambivalent, sensual script that resists disclosing its mystery.
Twombly's delicate, deliberate markings and swirls in oil, pencil and wax crayon abound in lyrical gesture and swiping movements across the surface of the canvas. The fluid impression of lyricism mingles with a deeper, more enigmatic rhetoric of meaning and associations. Twombly explains that "Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate story...it is an involvement in essence...into a synthesis of feeling, intellect etc. occurring without separation in the impulse of action" (Twombly quoted in H. Bastian, CY TWOMBLY: CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE PAINTINGS, Vol. II, 1961-65, MUNICH, 1993, p. 21). With such a combination of cloudlike bursts, architectonic structures, biomorphic signs, Twombly's outpouring of vivid color, fluid drips of creamy white, animate his canvases, as Untitled (Rome) demonstrates. Twombly's line ebbs and flows with the choreography of form and formlessness in Untitled (Rome).
Twombly transforms his painted canvases by obsessively scrawling graphics in pencil and in dark and colored crayons, then painting over these marks partly, covering some, glazing over others, and drawing again into the new layer of paint. Devoid of the regular breaks associated with the paintbrush, Twombly's line moves freely, as if following its own impulses. Twombly explains, "Every line is thus the actual experience with its unique story. It does not illustrate; it is the perception of its own realization" (Cy Twombly, in
L'ESPERIENZA MODERNA, no. 2, Aug.-Sept. 1957, p. 32). Thus, it is the fluency of Twombly's complex scribbled lines in Untitled (Rome), that reflects a confidence and sense of enjoyment and mastery of the raw mark.
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Saturday May 3, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 4, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 5, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 6, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 7, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 8, 2003 10am to 5pm, Friday May 9, 2003 10am to 5pm, Saturday May 10, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 11, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 12, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 13, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 14, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 15, 2003 10am to 2pm
Additional Fees:
Shipping Details:
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