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Descriptif du lot
With its cascades of calligraphic white line looping and oscillating over a rich, vertical grey surface, Untitled (1971) is a lyrical example of Cy Twombly’s series of ‘blackboard’ works. These grey-ground pictures, defined by their dark backdrops and chalk-like marks, are among the most cerebral and atmospheric in Twombly’s oeuvre. He began making them after returning to Rome from a visit to New York in 1966, and—working between both cities—continued their production on canvas and paper until 1971. The present work features electric rows of white crayon like cursive script, swelling in amplitude from top to bottom. Visible brushstrokes in the grey heighten the appearance of motion. The bright lines are echoed by more ghostly gestures, made faint as Twombly carved his crayon through the still-wet paint, which create a layered and shadowy sense of depth. In the lower half, a darker graphite scrawl whips through the white lines in anarchic leaps and swirls. In 1975 the work was shown by the renowned dealer and collector Ingvild Goetz in the exhibition Cy Twombly: Grey Paintings at her Galerie Art in Progress, Munich. Its two-sheet vertical composition is a distinct rarity among these works. The catalogue raisonné of Twombly’s drawings records just three other examples, one of which, made in 1969, is in The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
After the whirling, carnal conflagrations of his early-1960s Roman canvases, Twombly’s ‘blackboard’ works displayed a cool, restrained outlook that chimed with the Minimalist and conceptual currents in New York at the time. With their roots in his work as a cryptologist in the US Army during the 1950s—when he would draw in the dark at night, freeing the hand from the eye—they also related to the Palmer handwriting drills taught to children in American schools during Twombly’s youth, the ‘Deluge’ drawings and scientific diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci, and the dynamic, energetic compositions of the Italian Futurists. American critics who had disdained the erudite ‘European’ qualities of Twombly’s Roman paintings welcomed their stringent simplicity. Despite their asceticism, however, works such as the present contain subtle splendours in their layered, thinly washed paint and endlessly varied lines. As Kirk Varnedoe observes, ‘neither geometry nor straight edges ever dominate the variations of the hand as it moves … Fluctuating individual energies invariably take precedence over rigorously systematic ideas’ (‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 41).
Twombly’s assistant Nicola Del Roscio has compared these works to silent concertos, and recalls a vivid, performative aspect to their making, particularly in Twombly’s Roman studio on the Via di Monserrato. After laying newspapers down to protect the floor—which would flutter dramatically as the artist worked—Del Roscio helped to prepare the painted grounds, and Twombly began to inscribe his inimitable line: ‘A fluid gesture or a rolling one in a seismographic flow from the mind that could sometimes end in a slight tantrum, or as if writing a letter describing a dream … I still have the vision of Cy’s hands holding the white wax sticks like a conductor’s wand, moving as if by magic and describing a soundless track in the imperceptible attempt to describe a sound. Now and then the white wax crayon would break under the pressure of his fingers on the paper, interrupting a mysterious and pleasant silence’ (‘The Atmosphere and People around Cy, 1970-1971’, in N. Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings Volume 5 1970–1971, Munich, 2015, p. 6).
Twombly’s work of this period can be seen to negotiate among the stimulations of history, classical mythology and sensual life he had been so enthused by in Rome and the cooler urban environment and intellectual currents prevailing in New York City. In 1970 he made a series of drawings with blue crayon on lighter grey grounds, known as the ‘Roman Notes’, which read like love letters between the two. Neither a European or American artist, Twombly was forever in motion, synthesising a prolific range of experience and inspiration across his practice. In 1971 alone, he showed new work in Paris and in Turin, and made drawings, paintings and collages in Rome, on the Italian island of Capri and in his Bowery studio in New York. He spent that spring listening to the animated conversations of the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who holidayed annually in Rome, at a café opposite the Italian Parliament.
If the present work leaves behind the emotive, heated colour of Twombly’s first Roman period, it is no less charged with the life of the mind and the body. It was composed as the artist moved through space like a performer, with poetry and music at his fingertips. Its grisaille is in some ways less a departure than a return, recalling earlier monochrome pictures such as Panorama (1955), made in Robert Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio as Twombly’s adventures were just beginning. In other ways it looks forward: less staccato than those earlier works, its marks are alive with a sense of continual propulsion. No gesture is the same, no arrangement symmetrical. The lines are purposeful and powerful, charged in their tension between restraint and abandon. They coil, intertwine and unravel, erased, overdrawn and entangled through mists of time and space.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.
After the whirling, carnal conflagrations of his early-1960s Roman canvases, Twombly’s ‘blackboard’ works displayed a cool, restrained outlook that chimed with the Minimalist and conceptual currents in New York at the time. With their roots in his work as a cryptologist in the US Army during the 1950s—when he would draw in the dark at night, freeing the hand from the eye—they also related to the Palmer handwriting drills taught to children in American schools during Twombly’s youth, the ‘Deluge’ drawings and scientific diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci, and the dynamic, energetic compositions of the Italian Futurists. American critics who had disdained the erudite ‘European’ qualities of Twombly’s Roman paintings welcomed their stringent simplicity. Despite their asceticism, however, works such as the present contain subtle splendours in their layered, thinly washed paint and endlessly varied lines. As Kirk Varnedoe observes, ‘neither geometry nor straight edges ever dominate the variations of the hand as it moves … Fluctuating individual energies invariably take precedence over rigorously systematic ideas’ (‘Inscriptions in Arcadia’, in Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 41).
Twombly’s assistant Nicola Del Roscio has compared these works to silent concertos, and recalls a vivid, performative aspect to their making, particularly in Twombly’s Roman studio on the Via di Monserrato. After laying newspapers down to protect the floor—which would flutter dramatically as the artist worked—Del Roscio helped to prepare the painted grounds, and Twombly began to inscribe his inimitable line: ‘A fluid gesture or a rolling one in a seismographic flow from the mind that could sometimes end in a slight tantrum, or as if writing a letter describing a dream … I still have the vision of Cy’s hands holding the white wax sticks like a conductor’s wand, moving as if by magic and describing a soundless track in the imperceptible attempt to describe a sound. Now and then the white wax crayon would break under the pressure of his fingers on the paper, interrupting a mysterious and pleasant silence’ (‘The Atmosphere and People around Cy, 1970-1971’, in N. Del Roscio, ed., Cy Twombly Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings Volume 5 1970–1971, Munich, 2015, p. 6).
Twombly’s work of this period can be seen to negotiate among the stimulations of history, classical mythology and sensual life he had been so enthused by in Rome and the cooler urban environment and intellectual currents prevailing in New York City. In 1970 he made a series of drawings with blue crayon on lighter grey grounds, known as the ‘Roman Notes’, which read like love letters between the two. Neither a European or American artist, Twombly was forever in motion, synthesising a prolific range of experience and inspiration across his practice. In 1971 alone, he showed new work in Paris and in Turin, and made drawings, paintings and collages in Rome, on the Italian island of Capri and in his Bowery studio in New York. He spent that spring listening to the animated conversations of the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who holidayed annually in Rome, at a café opposite the Italian Parliament.
If the present work leaves behind the emotive, heated colour of Twombly’s first Roman period, it is no less charged with the life of the mind and the body. It was composed as the artist moved through space like a performer, with poetry and music at his fingertips. Its grisaille is in some ways less a departure than a return, recalling earlier monochrome pictures such as Panorama (1955), made in Robert Rauschenberg’s Fulton Street studio as Twombly’s adventures were just beginning. In other ways it looks forward: less staccato than those earlier works, its marks are alive with a sense of continual propulsion. No gesture is the same, no arrangement symmetrical. The lines are purposeful and powerful, charged in their tension between restraint and abandon. They coil, intertwine and unravel, erased, overdrawn and entangled through mists of time and space.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.