About the Work
From the 1950s onwards, Twombly’s drawings were dominated by rhythmically repeating line progressions, vortices, and isolated digits. Pencil, coloured pencil, and ballpoint pen facilitated this 'scriptural' drawing mode, which ultimately includes even the artist’s signature. On the white of the paper, they look provokingly like mere scribbles scattered across the surface as if by chance or remind us of clumsy handwriting. In fact, however, they are a form of graphism: direct seismographic traces of a physical, but also a poetic-artistic, process.
About the Acquisition
The Städel Museum has the photographer, psychotherapist, philanthropist, and long-time Frankfurt resident Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019) to thank for more than ninety works ranging from classical modernism to American pop art. The paintings, drawings, and prints by Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Oskar Schlemmer, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, and others originally belonged to the holdings of her grandfather, the Darmstadt-based industrialist Karl Ströher (1890–1977), who amassed an extensive art collection after World War II.
