(Lexington, Virginia 1928–2011 Rome)
Untitled, 1963–64, signed Cy Twombly, coloured pencil, pencil, wax crayon on paper, 86 x 67 cm, framed

The work was presented to Del Roscio in September 2019
and he confirmed the authenticity with the correct measurement.

Provenance:
Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne
Private Collection, Germany
Kunsthaus Lempertz, 3.12.2016, lot 450
acquired there by the present owner

Literature:
Nicola Del Roscio, Cy Twombly, Drawings, Catalogue Raisonné Gagosian Gallery, New York (Ed.), Munich 2011, vol. 4, no. 20,
with wrong dimension (colour ill.).

Cy Twombly’s graphic language is utterly inimitable. His work is about uncoding symbols, alphabets and numbers until they become nothing other than themselves. “Twombly’s egocentric seriousness is the sunlight that shines out of his works.”
Pierre Restany, Paris, 7 September 1961, in: Twombly, Munich 1987, p. 27

“Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don’t like oil because you can’t get back into it, or you make a mess. It’s not my favourite thing... pencil is more my medium than wet paint.”
Cy Twombly

Abstract Expressionism saw artists including Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns develop the first heroic, independent artistic movement in America. They all broke free from the expected conventions of design, and instead, the challenge they faced consisted much more of confronting themselves with the original, virtual, empty image field, which was often large in size.

In Cy Twombly’s works, lines become an independent, vibrating statement. Colour is not used in service of representation: instead, it is the subject, matter and substance. His works are unique, dynamic drawings, written epics that cannot be analysed and broken down: they can only be synthesised and understood as a whole. His signature does not designate that the work has been completed; it remains part of the fleetingly captured image.

In Twombly’s works, lines are consciously artistic and artificial. They become a vibrating, independent, complex “ego” and “id” in constantly extended landscapes, spaces and actions. Cy Twombly worked on his lines, bringing them to heel so that they could depict form, tempo, depth and much more at the same time. When discussing the subject of lines, Cy Twombly said that “each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realisation.” (Cy Twombly in: Cy Twombly, Bilder, Arbeiten auf Papier, Skulpturen, Munich 1987, p. 10)