Untitled

Made at a pivotal moment in Cy Twombly’s career, Untitled (1970) is a lyrical symphony in blue and silver-grey. It is part of the artist’s Roman Notes series, completed in New York after a summer spent on Lake Bolsena outside Rome. Four sapphire lines coil mellifluously across a luminous pale surface, leaping up and plunging down. Applied in wax crayon, the lines shift from rich ultramarine to pale azure. They sometimes seem to blur, as if shifting in and out of focus. Light swathes of oil paint, alive with brushwork and traces of the artist’s fingerprints, underpin the blues. The work dates from the same period as Twombly’s ‘blackboard’ paintings, which unlocked the artistic potential of asemic writing in his work.

Twombly’s marks invoke some primal language, unknowable even to the artist himself. The looping blue lines are neither cursive script nor painting but allude to both, while dancing on the line between abstraction and representation. Twombly, writes Simon Schama, dealt with ‘the history (even the prehistory) of human marks, from the most archaeologically primordial of scratches and incisions to the development of the rhythmic dexterities which would generate calligraphy, and then before they could be attached to meaning, would break up into the disrupted and disrupting raw matter of scribble, doodle and scrawl’ (‘Cy Twombly’, in N. del Roscio, ed., The Essential Cy Twombly, London, 2014, p. 11). Twombly’s fascination with mark-making was longstanding. During his military service between 1953 and 1954 he worked as a cryptologist, making and breaking secret codes. he would draw at night without a light source, both liberating himself from the rigidity of his daily work and allowing him to experiment with his own automatist graphology.

The Roman Notes belong to a turning point in Twombly’s practice. Having settled in Rome in the late 1950s, he had begun to visit New York more frequently during the 1960s, working extensively in studios on the Bowery and Canal Street in the latter years of the decade. The blackboard paintings reflected this new phase in his work, reflective of the austere New York environment and the minimalism then becoming dominant in the city’s art world. Their wordless script resembled the loops of the Palmer Method, a scheme of penmanship instruction popular in America from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, designed to teach children how to write in cursive script through repetition. The Roman Notes might be seen as missives connecting Twombly’s Europhile inclinations with the atmosphere across the Atlantic. The series aches with nostalgia for the Italian capital, a city whose ruins and follies are laden with graffiti and indecipherable symbols.

Works such as the present also draw upon Italy’s unparalleled artistic tradition. Twombly’s marching lines recall the propulsive dynamism of Futurist artists such as Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla. Kirk Varnedoe reflects that these pictures’ turbulence ‘has an obvious expressive dimension that overlaps with the Futurist metaphors of spiritual agitation’ (‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in Cy Twombly, A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 41). At the same time, the picture glows with a lightness and clarity reminiscent of early Renaissance painting. Its undulating script is redolent of that seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated notebooks, while the lines conjure the spiralling torrents of the his ‘deluge’ drawings. Twombly’s line is serenely composed but laced with a restless energy, forever finding its way home.