Executed on the Caribbean island of St Martin’s, while staying as a guest of Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1969 exemplifies Cy Twombly’s visually distinctive vocabulary. Edwin Parker Twombly, or Cy as he was better known, started his career with a formal artistic training in 1950’s America. Entering the art world alongside contemporaries such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly had a lifelong association with many New York School artists, and yet remained on the group’s periphery. Many have associated this detachment with his move from America to Italy in the late 1950’s. Despite his absence from the vogue New York art scene, a voracious traveller, Twombly spent much of his time on the road drawing strong influences from his ever-changing surroundings and thus developing his deeply personal pictorial vernacular. Twombly’s life long assistant, Nicola Del Roscio, referred to this depth in his work succinctly as a ‘classic mind nourished by a globalised intellect.’ (Nicola Del Roscio, Cy Twombly Drawings Cat. Rais. Vol 4 1964-1969, Schirmer/Mosel, Gagosian Gallery…)

Perhaps, Twombly’s greatest influence was a stint as a cryptologist in the US army which shaped the artists fascination with the enigmatic and enhanced his methodical and repetitive approach to his work. The artist’s use of codified language, coupled with gestural mark-marking, denoting his quest for ‘expressive immediacy’, has formed a body of work which is truly unique in the canon of art history. The present lot is no exception; the plan-view composition with intersecting geometric shapes, akin to architectural drawings, infused with expressive marks draws a paradox between the regimented line and the artist’s impulsive response to his surroundings. The frenetic and free quality in Twombly’s works is often linked his New York School origins and his affiliation with abstract expressionism. Similar to the aforementioned, Untitled, 1969 is visceral and rich with the physical presence of the artist – collaged together with his curiosity surrounding poetry, history and architecture.

‘Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realisation.’ (Cy Twombly, ‘Signs,’L’Esperienza moderna, no.2, August/September 1957, pp.32–3).

The dichotomy between structure and free hand is furthered by Twombly’s use of recognisable numbers and lettering which have been strewn across the paper plain in ambiguous fashion. These combinations add to the formal aspects of the work- fostering a link with ‘order’ and yet bare no obvious narrative - abstract in their surroundings - save only their identifiable form as a number. In this sense, the artist’s use of distinguishable symbols amongst the abstract mark-making acts as a ‘texture’ within the construct of the work. Indeed, the numbers and lettering in Twombly’s work have often been described as ‘signifiers’ serving as a means to ‘navigate’ the viewer through the layered complexity of each composition.