Jonathan Williams, Cy Twombly, Black Mountain College, 1951, Courtesy of Thomas Meyer
The Erasure of Painting:
Cy Twombly’ s Second Voyage to Italy
By Sara Buoso
Cy Twombly Room, Installation view, GNAMC, Photo: Alessandro Vasari, Donation Cy Twombly Foundation
This article retraces a fundamental chapter in Cy Twombly’s oeuvre, practice, and research, with particular attention to a body of work dated 1957-1964 in which the artist testifies to his encounter with classical, mediterranean culture. This encounter is significant for further interpretation of how classical archetypical imagery and mythology can contribute to the style of Abstract Expressionism and its legacy. This article is suggested by a major donation of twelve works by the Cy Twombly Foundation to GNAMC, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Rome, on September 20, 2025, which includes two private donations by collector Giorgio Franchetti and former GNAMC director Palma Lucarelli.
Beyond the aesthetic category of Abstract Expressionism lie different motifs and interpretations. Without dwelling on how some artists already resisted this definition back in the 1950s, nowadays it is still fascinating to investigate how the juxtaposing of these two only apparently contrasting terms—the subjectivity of expressionism and the rigor of the intellectual mind—can inform the inherent ambiguity of this style. The work of the artist Cy Twombly (1928, Lexington, Virginia – 2011, Rome) is an eloquent example in this regard. Since his early formation in Abstract Expressionism at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Washington and Lee University in Lexington, the artist’s practice was deeply influenced by this school of thought as seen in early works in which he experimented with surrealist, automatic, and subconscious methodologies in relation to drawing and painting. It is well known, however, that Twombly elaborated a personal and distinctive interpretation of this style by finding roots in classical archetypes and archaeologies, Mediterranean mythologies, and music and poetry. We intend to retrace the lineage of this archetypal and mythological imaginary by focusing on the pivotal moment when Twombly encountered the surrounding Tyrrhenian coast between the regions of Latium and Campania, which will become his second home, between 1957 and 1963. While focusing on this chapter of Twombly’s life, this mapping aims to foreground the importance of thinking of tropes not as fixed, but as travelling, migrating, and informing both the Mediterranean culture and the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This journey begins with a friendship. After meeting Twombly at the Art Students League in New York, 1950-1951, the artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925, Port Arthur – 2008, Captiva, U.S.) suggested that Twombly enroll in summer and fall courses at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he deeply assimilated the influence of Abstract Expressionism under the wings of established artists and faculty members such as Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and poet Charles Olson. One year later, in 1952, thanks to a bursary from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Twombly and Rauschenberg embarked on a grand tour of Morocco, Italy, Spain, and France where Twombly made his first encounter with the Mediterranean culture and imagery and was deeply impressed by it. It is well known that since his early years, Cy Twombly used to say: “When I grow up, I'll go to Rome.” His desire and dream came to fruition during this trip when he had the opportunity to travel along the Latium Littorale and resided for six weeks in a hotel in Via Margutta facing Piazza di Spagna, in Rome, where he entered into contact with the vibrant artistic scene of via Ripetta, still the headquarters of the ABA, Fine Arts Academy. During this residency, Twombly visited the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums where he was particularly impressed by the mosaic asàrotos òikos, also known as “Unswept Floor,” which preserves a series of pagan mosaics by the artist Heraclitus (second century BC) citing the mosaicist style of the Hellenic artist Sosos of Pergamon (second century BC) depicting the realistic remains of a symposium scene, a decorative piece found in a villa in the Aventine Hill in Rome at the time of Emperor Hadrian. In front of this scene, Twombly commented: “One must desire the ultimate essence even if it is like a pea pod, contaminated.” In 1953, Twombly had a solo show at Galleria di Via della Croce 71, Rome, and participated in a group exhibition at Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea, Florence.
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Cy Twombly, Second Voyage to Italy (The Fall of Hyperion) ,1962, Donation Giorgio Franchetti © Cy Twombly Foundation
Twombly’s return to New York the next year preceded a series of exhibitions. His three one-person exhibitions at Stable Gallery, New York, in 1955, 1956, and 1957 are particularly noteworthy. Twombly also served in the U.S. Army at Camp Gordon near Augusta, Georgia in 1953-54, as a cryptologist. Several years of artistic research and practice in New York, Washington, and Lexington culminated in a signed contract for the newly opened Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1957.
Twombly’s Mediterranean memories may have left significant traces in his imaginary and they may have prompted the artist’s second visit to Italy between 1957-1958, by invitation of the expressionist and concrete-abstract artist, Toti Scajola (1914-1998, Rome). Twombly travelled between Rome, Grottaferrata, Procida, and Naples, along the Tyrrhenian Sea, and in the winter of that year, he returned to Rome, renting an apartment facing the Colosseum which became the scene where he envisioned the frames of a new classical imaginary. In fact, this is the period when he painted the works Olympia, Arcadia, Blue Room, and Sunset (all 1957), whilst continuing to cultivate his relationship with the Abstract Expressionist artist Willem De Kooning (1904, Rotterdam – 1997, New York), a resident in Rome at that time, as well as others. Perhaps this was also a period for critical reflection, as suggested by a rare statement by the artist published by the journal Esperienza Moderna (1957-1959, University of Udine). Twombly states, “Each line is now the actual experience with its innate history. It does not illustrate. It is instead the sensation of its own realization.” This period is also marked by a series of exhibitions, such as his solo show at Galleria La Tartaruga directed by Plinio De Martiis in 1958. Rome was also where Twombly met his wife, Contessa Luisa Tatiana Franchetti, whom he married on April 20,1959 in New York, and with whom he returned to Rome the following year, choosing a seventeenth century palace near Piazza Farnese as their residence, as discussed in the article “Roman Classic Surprise” by Valentine Lawford, and photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, 1966. This was also where Twombly met his long-time assistant, archivist and friend, Nicola del Roscio, founder of Nicola Del Roscio Foundation in Rome and president of Cy Twombly Foundation, New York.
Cy Twombly, Olympia, 1957, Oil based house paint, wax crayon, coloured pencil, lead pencil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 104 inches, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York © Cy Twombly
Although Twombly’s encounter with the Mediterranean culture represents a point of no return, this doesn’t mean his work fell into the melancholic spleen of the past; it means, rather, that he sought to expand and extend this cultural inheritance in relation to the language of Abstract Expressionism in both poetic and metaphorical terms. This pivotal encounter is evidenced by the drawing Untitled, 1957, a gouache work realized with wax crayon and pencil on the surface of an irregularly cut piece of cardboard, figuring the encounter with a new, Mediterranean horizon. In this work, Twombly’s ethical and aesthetic preoccupations for circumscribing the planes of his spatial composition are evident. On the one hand, he is interested in connotating the spatial and pictorial fields with a diagrammatic squared drawing, while on the other hand, he seems to start taking a leap from composition in search of metaphorical connotations. Confronting the metaphor of the window, which only serves as a sort of primordial mapping still grounded in geometry, Twombly leaves the scene for something else happening within the fields of his painting. In fact, the most distinctive trait emerging from his work is the artist’s expressive signature, a graphism derived from the lesson of gestural Expressionism, further emphasized by his use of primary colors such as red and blue, and ultimately turning into an undulated vortex of lines and signs. Whilst retrospectively marking Twombly’s first presence in Italy, this piece is symptomatic of a period when the artist was still elaborating his own voice by interpreting an expressive and gestural position derived from Abstract Expressionism in relation to a new cultural horizon. Critics have often defined this period of Twombly’s artistic research in terms of “graffiti style,” but Twombly himself always qualified this description, finding it too aggressive. In “I work in waves,” an interview with Nicholas Serota published in The Guardian in 2008, Twombly describes his use of graffiti-like marks as “more lyrical . . . more complicated, more elaborate.” In “Time-Lines: Rilke and Twombly on the Nile,” (Tate Papers, 2008), Mary Jacobus describes Twombly’s graphism as creating “force fields of allusion.” In this sense, it may be more appropriate to define the graphism expressed in Untitled as a juxtaposition of both gestural and epigraphic signs, informing a cryptic if not already semiotic writing. As we will discuss later, there will be a further step into Twombly’s artistic graphism when he encounters the virtuosity of the Mannerist Italian style which he puts in relationship to the gestural expressivity of Expressionist Abstraction freely and distinctly. In this sense, it is not fortuitous that in 1957, Twombly also experimented with a series of drawings in Grottaferrata, Rome, Procida, and Naples, a series of works that he later destroyed.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1957, Gouache, wax crayon, pencil on irregularly cut cardboard, 12 ³⁄₁₆ × 14 ⅛ inches, Donation Cy Twombly Foundation
Most significantly, the classical imaginary began to resurface in the artist’s mind as became evident in the series of paintings of 1957: Olympia, Arcadia, Blue Room, and Sunset, which Twombly realizes when returns to Rome later that year. The Mediterranean, classical culture and contexts, rich in archetypes and cultural connotations, allow him to explore further the imaginal territory of the surrealists and automatic methods. He finds a response in the arcadian and archeological imaginary that almost resonates with the Metaphysical positioning of Giorgio De Chirico (1888, Volo – 1978, Rome) but exempt from any expressivity or gesturalism. Eventually, this questioning will inform a sense of drama in his work, a sensibility split between Apollonian and Dionysian feelings according to the classics.
Twombly’s horizon is soon deeply influenced by the solar, heliotropic culture of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and in particular the Ulysses coast spread between Rome and Naples where the artist travelled and worked in the summer of 1959. This period is represented by a series of drawings, collages, and paintings titled Poems to the Sea, 1959, and among others, a series of less known works titled Sperlonga collages which symbolize the artist’s encounter with an Apollonian vision where both lines and colors disappear at the borders of the terrestrial landscape and the plane of the sea in search of the warm, yet opaque qualities of colors and light in terms of transparency and lyricism. The Sperlonga series epitomizes Twombly’s interest in the negative space of composition through an erasure of the pictorial field that is grounded in archaeology. This results in his work being evocative of the past as well as being lively vibrant and sensibly new. In Sperlonga, Twombly found the ideal context to cultivate his passion for poetry through readings of classic literature such as Homer, Cicero, Catullo, and Virgil, in line with his interest in the Romanticism of John Keats and the symbolism of Stéphane Mallarmé, with the aim of transposing the freedom of these poetic compositions into spatial fields and visual forms. But these early Mediterranean works are far from being melancholic or nostalgic for a forgotten past. Through material experimentation and new forms of composition, Twombly makes evident how classical references can serve as metaphors for the present, and this Apollonian line of artistic investigation will stay with him in the future, as seen, for example, in his lithograph, Apollo and the Artist (1975).
Cy Twombly, Poems to the Sea 1959, Oil, crayon, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, One of 24 sheets,
Photo: Douglas M. Parker,Collection Dia Art Foundation, New York © Cy Twombly
Along this coast, Twombly begins to cultivate an interest in the narration and visualization of founding myths. This is evident in the painting Rape of the Sabines, (1961-63) which cites the legend of Romulus’s abduction of the Sabine women through this iconography and particularly through the dramatic vision of the painter Pietro Da Cortona (1596, Cortona – 1669, Rome) who dealt with this subject to suggest a Dionysian spirit and sensibility according to the Baroque style. We can observe how, in this painting, Twombly is interested in exploring the eroticism and ecstasy which will inform the artist’s jouissance in painting. This classical subject allows him to explore the contrast between sexuality and aggressive impulses, productivity and destruction, passion and the rational mind, all informing the artist’s interest in freeing the style of automatic graphism. In this painting, organic forms and abstract gestures are fused by merging the styles of symbolism and surrealism to suggest new understandings of the pictorial field through intuitive marks, tensions, patterns, beauty, and destruction as a form of non-representational, abstract art. This Dionysian line of artistic research will continue in his later works, as seen in Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version IV) (2004).
Another pivotal moment in the artist’s career occurs when Twombly encounters the virtuosity of the late Renaissance Mannerist style, as is evident in the painting School of Athens (1961) where Twombly pays homage to the masterpiece by Raffaello Sanzio at Musei Vaticani (1509-1511) by meticulously imitating the original representation through drawing. The final oeuvre substitutes Raffaello’s architectural composition for an apotheosis of signs and colors sublimated through a luminous and vibrant colored calligraphy. This work can be read as a turning point in the artist’s career when he fuses the style of Abstract Expressionism with a sense of graphic virtuosity not exempt from drama, which all relate to Twombly’s interpretation of pictorial space, color, and graphism.
Cy Twombly, School of Athens, 1961, oil, oil-based house paint, colored pencil and lead pencil on canvas, 190.3 x 200.5 cm,photo: Robert Bayer, Bildpunkt AG, Munchenstein
For Twombly, archaeology and classicism are allegories for the past and the present, culminating in his interest in ancient mythology. In Twombly’s works of this period, myths appear, as shown in the elusive citation of the myth of Venus in the rare sculptural gesso piece Untitled (1959), citing non-representational elements of the classical iconography of Venus, a myth that the artist will invoke several more times, as in his later painting Birth of Venus (1962), and in the graphite work on paper, Venus + Adonis (1975). This follows an investigation of other major mythological figures, as seen in the works Triumph of Galatea (1961) The Empire of Flora (1961), and Leda and the Swan (1962).
One emblematic painting of this period is Second Voyage to Italy (The Fall of Hyperion) (1962), presented at the thirty-second Venice Biennale in 1964. It is evident here that Twombly has matured a personal sense of spatial composition, an empty and floating field in the background that is fixed by the virtuosity of signs as descending movements, colors and expressivity. In terms of composition, Twombly still feels the need to anchor it in a diagrammatic scheme – which is both literal and numeric – that serves the rhythm of lines and colors in the foreground. With this painting, Twombly touches on a foundational myth, the myth of the titan Hyperion, son of Uranus and Gea and father of Sun, Aurora, and Eos, thus a myth for the light in the world. Twombly rethinks and reenacts this foundational myth through the line of a surrealist and symbolic graphism that is informed by mythological and Mediterranean connotations. With the purpose of giving form and vision to a new classicism, Twombly cites here two unfinished epic poems that reflect on foundational myths and their values in different epochs by the Romantic poet John Keats (1795, Rome – 1821, Rome), cited in the oeuvre Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), Second Voyage to Italy (The Fall of Hyperion), officially positions Twombly internationally as having developed a sophisticated language where Abstract Expressionism is bonded with a metaphor of classicism. The painting is an eloquent example of a new sense of spatial and pictorial composition that refuses the norms of easel painting, turning it into a “reality of whiteness.” As he wrote in his statement for L’Esperienza Moderna in 1957, the reality of whiteness is a metaphor for the pure infinite vastness which cannot be eradicated but can only be perceived in suspension. According to Twombly, “The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear). Whiteness may be the classic state of the intellect or a neo-romantic idea of remembrance, or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé.” Twombly’s contribution consists in transposing the poetic space of Mallarmé onto the pictorial field, connoting the space and composition of abstract fields with a metaphor of light and purity and contributing to the investigation of the pictorial field in Abstract Expressionism. His pictorial composition is intentionally an erasure reaching the vastness and the purity of past and present infinities of painting which actualizes through rhythms and undulations on the surface.
Cy Twombly, Venus, 1975. Oil stick, oil paint, graphite, and paper collage on paper, 59 1/16 × 52 9/16 inches. Collection Cy Twombly Foundation © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Mimmo Capone.
This also explains why graphism is fundamental in Twombly’s work, a graphism that results in a marking onto indefinite territories. From his early graffiti-style paintings, not to mention his experience as a cryptographer, Twombly’s practice gradually moves away from his interest in graphic traits to formulate a scratch and scribble style. Loyal to the lesson of surrealist automatism learnt in the school of Abstract Expressionism, Twombly elaborates a personal, primitivist, archaic, and optimistic sense of graphism. As philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes commented in "Cy Twombly, ou ‘Non Multa Sed Multum’”(1976), the artist’s contribution lies in having addressed a spontaneous, gestural, progressive writing, where there is no appropriation but only the marking and the jouissance of signs. In The Wisdom of Art (1979), Barthes reinforces this thesis, arguing that Twombly’s work puts forward a new idea for Abstract Expressionism where beyond the norms of representation, his painting is meant to speak of events happening within the pictorial field manifested through delicate gestures that produce an effect whilst cultivating a Mediterranean sensibility mostly seen in materials and sensations. In this sense, Twombly’s practice is a free, asemic, and generative form of visual writing prior to any figuration or verbalization, epitomizing the crisis of signification of the modern and contemporary epoch.
Between effects and delicacy, it is also important to understand Twombly’s coloristic sensibility, a sensibility seen in his virtuosic style, a style split between decoration and the grotesque. Twombly’s use of intersections of color are meant to actualize the effects and sensibility of his painting by enacting the conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits in terms of fear, joy, allusion, vagueness, and gesture. Color is an affirmative trait of Twombly’s painting that speaks of rhythm, timbres and tones, a vivid and purified color that reverberates through the lesson of sublimated Abstract Expressionism.
Ultimately, it is important to acknowledge Twombly’s interest in painting and poetry, as if responding to the Latin expression “as in painting, so in poetry” from Horace’s Ars Poetica (19 BC), which connotates a precise motif in the arts. Along with his interest in the classics, Twombly was also deeply influenced by Romantic and Modernist poets, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Ezra Pound, further extended into music and choreography through his encounters with musicians and choreographers such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham. According to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, as he writes in Orpheus (2017) and Studiolo (2019), Twombly’s contribution lies in his firm intention to avoid figuration, visibility, and representation. All his work, he adds, evokes an ascensional movement that whilst punctually responding to the call of the Muses is symptomatic of the rise and falls of the cycles of historical epochs.
The years 1957-1964 represent an important chapter in Cy Twombly’s life and career, an encounter with classicism and Mediterranean mythology that he will never abandon. Thereafter, Twombly will divide his life between the U.S. and Italy, moving residences between Rome and the villages of Gaeta, Grotta Ferrata, and Bassano Tiverina, until 2011. Following his first retrospective in Milwaukee in 1968, Twombly was honored with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1994, the Tate Modern in London, 2008, and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2009, which all testify to the artist’s interest in these new mappings of travelling tropes between the Mediterranean and American cultures and vice versa.
Cy Twombly's home in Rome, shot by the photographer Horst P. Horst for Vogue’s November issue of 1966.
Sara Buoso is an art critic and curator. She holds a PhD in Art Theory and History, Central Saint Martins, London, specializing in photology and practices of light. She is a lecturer in Contemporary Art History at AANT, Academy of Arts and New Technologies, and DAM, Digital Arts & Media Academy, Rome.
Sara Buoso
To read Anna Leung's text on Cy Twombly at the TATE Modern in the September 2008 Issue of The Art Section