Cy Twombly - Untitled. New York City 1968
Untitled. New York City 1968
172x228cm oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas
Sold for: USD 70.5 million
Auction house: Sotheby's, New York
Sale date: 11 November 2015
Seller: Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Irmas, Los Angeles
Buyer: Anonymous buyer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns but chose to live in Italy after 1957.
His paintings are predominantly large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. Many of his works are in the permanent collections of most of the museums of modern art around the world, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London and the New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was also commissioned for the ceiling of a room of the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
From Sotheby's:
In Untitled (New York City), Twombly’s cylindrical forms reverberate within their own echo chamber, refracting into seeming infinity whilst elegantly contained within the parameters of the canvas. Twombly here investigated the definition and physical nature of a simple geometrical element in space as it erupts within the picture plane with cataclysmic graphic narrative, pulsing with an ineffable rhythm. The six magnificent horizontal bands of loops increase in volume and expressive abandon as the artist progressed down the canvas—Twombly’s lassoed lines progressively lose regularity and control, resulting in thrillingly increased drips, smears, and spatters toward the bottom of the picture.