In a career spanning more than fifty years, Cy Twombly (born 1928 in Lexington/VA, lives in Rome/Italy), who can be regarded as one of the most important American artists, has developed a very personal style of painting. It combines elements of gestural and calligraphic abstraction, drawing, and writing with references to poetry and literature, in a subtle and sublime way. His works include paintings, paper works and sculptures.

At the beginning of the 1950s Twombly studied at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina under the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline. His influence is evident his Twombly’s earlier works, such as Landscape from 1952. Besides the later paper-work Untitled of 1972, it is one of a few works by Cy Twombly in The UBS Art Collection. Inspired by works by Robert Rauschenberg and Alberto Giacometti, the automatic writing of the Surrealists and some other influences, Twombly’s artistic language changed from the mid 1950s onwards towards more intimate gestural expressions, compared to the extrovert style of Abstract Expressionism. The perception of the human being from a fragile and unconscious, archaic and mythological point of view is interpreted through his paintings and paper works. On dense textures of white, light or gray paint, rhythmically drawn scribbles appear in all-over compositions, sometimes combined with numbers, geometrical forms, and words referring to classical mythology, poetry or just associative reflections by Twombly himself.

The Untitled paper-work of The UBS Art Collection exemplifies these formal elements in a sublime way. Here, graphite and crayon scribbles in red or blue, numbers and geometrical forms appear in combination with handwritten words which fluently dissolve almost like abstract lines. Some of these words can be deciphered as “shade”, “memory”, or “Ajax”, the name of a hero from the Iliad. The epic poem also became the source of inspiration for other works by Cy Twombly, who in the late 1950s moved to Rome permanently.

Reference: Cy Twombly. Fifty Years of Works on Paper, exh.cat., Munich:Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2004