Cy Twombly - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | Phillips

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 16 - 17 April

  • Provenance

    Sims Reed Gallery, London

  • Literature

    Heiner Bastian 41

  • Artist Biography

    Cy Twombly

    American • 1928 - 2011

    Cy Twombly emerged in the mid-1950s alongside New York artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. While at first developing a graffiti-like style influenced by Abstract Expressionist automatism–having notably studied under Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell at the legendary Black Mountain College between 1951 and 1952–Twombly was a prominent figure in the new generation of artists that challenged the abstract orthodoxy of the New York School. Twombly developed a highly unique pictorial language that found its purest expression upon his life-defining move to Rome in 1957. Simultaneously invoking classical history, poetry, mythology and his own contemporary lived experience, Twombly's visual idiom is distinguished by a remarkable vocabulary of signs and marks and the fusion of word and text. 

    Cy Twombly produced graffiti-like paintings that were inspired by the work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. His gestural forms of lines, drips and splattering were at first not well-received, but the artist later became known as the leader of the estrangement from the Abstract Expressionism movement. Full of energy and rawness, Twombly's pieces are reminiscent of childhood sketches and reveal his inspiration from mythology and poetry.

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244

Cy Twombly

Untitled, from Hommage à Picasso (B. 41)

1973
Lithograph and collotype in colors, on wove paper, the full sheet.
S. 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm)
Signed with initials and numbered 52/90 in pencil (there were also 30 in Roman numerals reserved for museums and 15 artist's proofs) co-published by Propyläen Verlag, Berlin and Pantheon Presse, Rome, framed.

Estimate
$5,000 - 7,000 

Sold for $8,890

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 16 - 17 April