Untitled
In the early 1950s Twombly attended legendary Black Mountain College with Robert Rauschenberg, among others. By 1957 he had moved to Rome, where he became drawn to Italian art from Leonardo da Vinci to the Futurists. Twombly was especially intrigued by Leonardo’s dynamic manuscripts and sketches in which text—often written in Leonardo’s backward hand—vies for space with drawings of storms, plant studies, and the human body. Here, Twombly’s delicate terra-cotta, gray, and deep blue echo Leonardo’s familiar red and black chalks with wash, while his looping scrawls—a technique Twombly developed in the late 1960s—become a graffitoed script, an arcane mixture of text and image.
Artwork Details
- Title: Untitled
- Artist: Cy Twombly (American, Lexington, Virginia 1928–2011 Rome)
- Date: 1970
- Medium: Oil and crayon on canvas
- Dimensions: 61 3/8 × 75 in. (155.9 × 190.5 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Purchase, The Bernhill Fund Gift, 1984
- Object Number: 1984.70
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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1952
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