Winter Ran Down A Plywood Panel In Gaeta

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Winter Picture), 2004. Acrylic on plywood in the artist’s frame. Gagosian, Madison Avenue, 2023.

Black and blue fall the length of a white field and refuse to stop at the bottom. Cy Twombly painted Untitled (Winter Picture) in 2004, acrylic on plywood panel, set in the artist’s own gilt frame. Gagosian lists the object at 98 7/8 by 69 3/4 by 2 3/4 inches, 251 by 177 by 7 centimeters. It hung at 980 Madison Avenue in the 2023 survey of late work, 20 January to 4 March, organized with the Cy Twombly Foundation. Jeff McLane took the gallery still. The painting is one of ten Winter Pictures made in Gaeta over the winter and early spring of 2003 to 2004.

The aw is the event. Household acrylic, brush, cloth, hand. A bluish white ground, then dark vertical weather. The carved gold frame is not a later courtesy. Twombly built it. Baroque wood around a panel that looks like a window after rain.

Signal. What happened: a 2004 Gaeta winter panel returned to Madison Avenue in 2023. Exact work: Untitled (Winter Picture), 2004, acrylic on plywood, artist’s frame, 98 7/8 × 69 3/4 × 2 3/4 in. When and where: painted Gaeta 2004, first shown London Gagosian May 2004 with the set of ten, New York Gagosian 980 Madison January to March 2023. Price: not a public list price on the 2023 wall label. Source: Gagosian exhibition page and Foundation credit. Why it matters: late Twombly treating a studio window as a season. Earlier DRIFT: none on this panel.

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Twombly signed, inscribed, and dated relate Winter Pictures on the reverse: Cy Twombly, Gaeta, 2004. The series used wooden panels in the same proportion as the windows in the Gaeta studio, a breezeway room with a view of the Gulf. The Art Institute of Chicago, write on the Natural World selection, put that proportion in print. Imagine rain on a muddy pane and the drips become weather instead of style.

This particular Madison canvas is the dark one people mean when they say Winter Picture in the 2023 room. White field. Black mass at the upper left. Blue that runs. Thin brown and rust threads. The paint does not sit. It travels. Twombly had spent decades making marks that looked like writing. Here the mark is gravity. Acrylic is thinner than the oil of the 1960s. It obeys the board.

The frame is gilt and carved and slightly too much, which is the point. A winter pane in a palace molding. Late Twombly liked that collision. Sculpture from plaster and scrap sat in the same 2023 hang. The frame on this panel is sculpture that happens to hold a painting.

He was seventy-five, seventy-six when the ten were made. He died in 2011. The last decade had already given Lepanto, the Bacchus cycles, the huge reds. Winter is the colder room. Brooklyn Rail, walking Madison in 2023, called two dark 2004 pictures a commemorate of end. Grandeur in the sadness, if you want that sentence. The panel itself is more stubborn. It just runs.

Sister works from the ten went through London Gagosian in May 2004 as Ten Paintings and a Sculpture, sold quickly, later Christie’s and Phillips as Untitled (Gaeta) or Untitled No. 3, catalogue raisonné Bastian Volume V. Dimensions wander a few inches across lots because some listings include the frame and some do not. The Gagosian 2023 card for this object reads 98 7/8 × 69 3/4 × 2 3/4.

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Gaeta sits on the Tyrrhenian. Twombly kept a white-stucco house there from the 1980s, not far from Sperlonga, where Poems to the Sea had been made in 1959. The Winter Pictures took six to eight months. Household paint on wood. Ten panels worked at once. A 1987 sculpture, Victory, dedicated to Dominique Bozo, joined them in London.

He had just come off Caribbean warmth. A Gathering of Time, 2003, six seascapes after St. Barthélemy, oil on canvas, horizontal, translucent water. Winter is the opposite climate. Opaque gulf. Vertical board. Earth and black instead of turquoise. The Art Institute text is blunt about that turn.

Technique in the late panels: coats of acrylic, brush, cloth, hand. He had once dropped the brush to suppress virtuosity. In 2004 he used the spill. Sylvester’s 2000 interview sits behind the decade. Twombly talking about returning to things you have a sentiment for when you get old. White as a happiness even when the subject is not white. The Winter Pictures are white first, then weather.

Lexington, Virginia, remained the other studio. The 2000s large paintings move between those two rooms. Madison in 2023 mixed the last decade: chrysanthemum contemplations, small burning untitled acrylics from 2003, sculpture, paper. The Winter Picture was the cold vertical in that mix. MFA Boston’s Making Past Present ran at the same time, Twombly against antiquities. Madison kept the late studio. Two cities, two arguments.

He was born in Lexington in 1928. Black Mountain. Rome. The graffiti myth is a critic’s shortcut. By 2004 the hand is a climate instrument. The gulf is outside the window. The panel is the window. The gilt is the joke that the window is also a picture.

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980 Madison, two floors, January to March 2023. Foundation partnership. Rob McKeever on the install shots. McLane on the object photography. The show did not pretend the Winter Picture was a new canvas. It placed a 2004 Gaeta panel inside a late-career room so the drip could stand next to plaster and paper.

Auction cousins from the same winter have carried estimates in the millions. A Gaeta 2004 panel at Phillips carried six to eight million and sold at $7,515,000. That is a sister, not this wall label. The 2023 exhibition was a viewing, not a sale sheet.

What you see in the still: a vertical weather system, frame like an heirloom. Black weather upper left. Blue columns. White that is not empty. Gold that refuses to be modest. If you want the sea, the drips are tide. If you want the window, they are rain. Twombly allowed both. The catalogue raisonné files the set. The London 2004 book, Ten Paintings (Winter Pictures 2004) and a Sculpture, is the first public binding.

Stand in front of the panel long enough and the gilt starts to look like another season. Summer frame, winter pane. That mismatch is the work. Gaeta in the inscription. Madison on the wall years after he was gone. The paint already finished running in 2004. The picture is what remains when the run stops.