“Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realisation. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgencies rather than an abstract totality of visual perception.”
—Cy TwomblyOscillating between frenetic energy and measured rhythm, Cy Twombly’s Roman Notes II from the Roman Notes series (1970) exemplifies his masterful approach to mark-making. At first glance, the composition appears as a torrent of handwriting – a stream of consciousness distilled onto paper. Yet, on closer inspection, the marks reveal themselves as abstract gestural scrawls rather than written words. Twombly’s surface brims with the erratic, scribbled, graffiti-like strokes, their delicate blue lines sprawling across a neutral background in an uninhibited dance. These varied, calligraphic gestures evoke the fluidity of cursive writing and the rhythmic undulation of waves, an ebb and flow that resists settling into any legible language. Nicola Del Roscio once described Twombly’s working process as a “seismographic flow from the mind,” a phrase that perfectly captures the psychological immediacy of Roman Notes II, where each gesture feels like an unfiltered expression of Twombly’s inner world.
Twombly’s relationship with Rome, the city he made his home in 1957, profoundly shaped his artistic practice. Fascinated by its ancient ruins, graffiti, and architectural splendour, Twombly drew inspiration from the layers of history etched into its surfaces. Rome’s palimpsest-like nature – a city where centuries coexist – is echoed in Twombly’s layered gestures, which seem to scratch and inscribe themselves into existence like ancient markings. The Roman Notes series also alludes to Renaissance manuscripts, particularly Leonardo da Vinci’s mirror-script Codices.
Zhang Xu, calligraphy, 8th century. Central to Twombly’s practice is asemic writing: a form of wordless calligraphy that inhabits the space between meaning and abstraction. Emerging during the Tang Dynasty through the wild-script calligraphy of figures such as Zhang Xu and Huaisu, asemic writing blurs the boundary between text and image, encouraging viewers to “read” through intuition rather than comprehension. Twombly embraced this tradition, merging automatic mark-making with a contemporary sensibility. In addition, Twombly’s brief experience as a cryptologist in the U.S. Army (1953-54) was formative; while studying code and cryptography, he experimented with drawing in the dark, “untraining” his hand to prioritise spontaneity over control. This approach, informed by Surrealist automatism and his own tactile explorations, produced works that suggest writing yet defy interpretation. Twombly’s asemic marks destabilise communication, instead inviting viewers to respond to the mark’s formal and emotional qualities.
“Twombly tells us that the essence of writing is neither form nor usage but simply gesture – the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a garble, almost a smudge, a negligence.”
—Roland BarthesRoland Barthes, the eminent theorist and one of Twombly’s most insightful observers, identified in Twombly’s gestures the essence of pure expression. Barthes described Twombly’s marks as “a negligence,” writing reduced to its gestural core: “the fragments of an indolence…the languid fatigue of love: a garment cast aside into a corner of the page.” For Barthes, Twombly’s asemic script becomes a trace of a past movement – a sensual, almost erotic act of creation. Like discarded remnants, Twombly’s lines preserve the energy of their making while relinquishing coherence.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Artwork: © Cy Twombly Foundation The Roman Notes series represents a key moment in Twombly’s development, expanding on the ideas explored in his celebrated Blackboard Paintings of the late 1960s. In those earlier works, Twombly introduced the looping, repetitive gestures reminiscent of chalk scrawls on a slate – much alike those found in his Roman Notes. Furthermore, the fluid spontaneity of the Roman Notes series anticipates the monumental red scrawls of Twombly’s later career in the early 2000s, where gestures erupt into pure colour and rhythm. Throughout his oeuvre, Twombly continually refined this graffiti-like approach, exploring the tension between ancient and modern, text and image, control and chaos. In Roman Notes II, as in much of his work, the act of writing becomes an exalted gesture – a mark that embodies presence and absence, a fleeting yet eternal trace of human expression.
Literature
Heiner Bastian 22
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.
17
Roman Notes II, from Roman Notes (B. 22)
1970
Offset lithograph in colours, on heavy offset paper, the full sheet.
S. 86.9 x 70 cm (34 1/4 x 27 1/2 in.)
Signed, dated and numbered 79/100 in pencil on the reverse (there were also 10 artist's proofs), published by Neuendorf Verlag, Hamburg, framed.
Estimate
£30,000 - 50,000 ‡
Sold for £48,260
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Evening & Day Editions
London Auction 23 - 24 January 2025
59
This lot is no longer available.
