Exceptional Prints: Cy Twombly

Untitled II, 1967

Intaglio with etching and open-bite aquatint on White J. Green handmade paper
 27 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches
 69.9 x 102.9 cm

“Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization.”

—Cy Twombly, 1966

One of the most impactful artists of the twentieth century, Cy Twombly (1928–2011) combined elements of gestural abstraction, mark making, and writing in a unique body of work spanning painting and drawing.

In 1967, Twombly traveled to Long Island to visit his close friend Robert Rauschenberg at esteemed fine art print publisher Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). With Rauschenberg’s encouragement, Twombly dove into printmaking over the next few months, working with master intaglio printer Donn Steward to produce a wide-ranging body of prints including the present work, impressions of which are held in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate, United Kingdom.

Installation view, Prints: Acquisitions 1973–1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976. Untitled II (1967) is visible at left. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Photo by Kate Keller

Twombly’s prints transform and interrogate the various motifs and themes that populate his painted oeuvre. During this period, Twombly created a small but significant group of intaglio prints, of which Untitled I and Untitled II—a pair of etchings with aquatint and open bite that feature slanted, tightly looping lines scrawled atop a dark ground—are the largest and most technically complex. These works are unique in medium and scale among Twombly’s printed works and remain his most important editions.

In the present work, Twombly drew atop an aquatint plate with open-bite liquid, creating lighter areas of reduced pigment that seem to glow as they follow the coil-like motion of his hand. Due to the unpredictable nature of the open-bite process, which made it impossible to control the spread of liquid and the exact visual effect produced, Twombly was also able to engage the same themes of chance and instinct that govern his paintings of organic abstract forms and energetic, scribbling lines.

Cy Twombly, Untitled II, 1967 (detail)

“In the two large-format aquatint etchings, Untitled I and Untitled II, [the] dynamic figuration of drawing is augmented by the deep grip of acid into the plate. The persistence of line refracts into multifarious shadings of light and dark echoes which seem to come from several levels; the whole image is seized by its imaginary inclusion of spatial depth, as in recurrent, rhythmic eruptions.”

—Heiner Bastian, 1984

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1967. The Menil Collection, Houston

Cy Twombly, Untitled (New York City), 1968. Private collection

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Untitled II is an early example of the looping line that is now iconic in Twombly’s oeuvre. “A line with a mind of its own” as described by the art historian Simon Schama, this abstract calligraphic motif seems to mimic the cadence of the written word.

In form, Untitled II directly relates to Twombly’s notable series of “blackboard” paintings and drawings, which he created between 1966 and the early 1970s. Twombly's dual engagement with the art-historical idea of the line and the cultural understanding of language resulted in works that are at once extremely nuanced and universally legible.

Cy Twombly, self-portrait in his studio on William Street, New York, 1956 (detail). Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio

Leonardo da Vinci, Atlantic Codex (Codex Atlanticus), 1478, f. 845 recto

In its approach to capturing space and time through form, Untitled II also reflects the artist’s interest in depictions of dynamic movement in the work of the Italian Futurists, as well as that of Leonardo da Vinci—influences connected with Twombly’s permanent move to Rome in 1957. As Heiner Bastian observes, “Twombly tries to shatter form as well as its concomitant intellectual and narrative history in a kind of relativism, reducing it to a rationality of ‘black and white’ that is at the same time the structural sum of all movement.”

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Philadelphia Museum of Art (left); Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (right)

“What is striking about these images [by Twombly] is their insistence on the kind of driving linear continuity that had heretofore been specifically excluded: the gesture that ... runs on without cessation. Personal expression becomes no longer something realized in the impulses of scattered, separate movements, but something subsumed within a stream.”

—Kirk Varnedoe, art historian and curator, 2002

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