The Written Word

A photograph taken by Robert Rauschenberg in his Fulton Street studio in 1954 records paintings and sculptures by Twombly that have since been altered or destroyed. He is shown presenting a version of his 1954 sculpture Untitled, with its loosely rendered scrawl of graphite, which he later veiled with a patina of white house paint and fabric. The photographed version and the paintings in the background highlight Twombly's impulse toward graffiti. The inspiration to "write" his paintings was in place by the early 1950s when he made images akin to pictographs.

By 1955 he was inscribing both sculpture and painting with symbols and scrawls approaching language. Through their dense accumulations of marks, these works recall Jackson Pollock's skeins of dripped and thrown paint, yet Twombly's aggressive signs effaced his painted surfaces. By the early 1960s the written word--and particularly references to poetry and myth--had a prominent role in Twombly's work. In light of his enigmatic practice of including yet often obscuring language, it is perhaps relevant that during his U.S. Army service from 1953 to 1954, Twombly was assigned to cryptology, the study and deciphering of codes.

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