Very few artists of the American postwar Abstraction left such a distinctive and poetic mark on the art world as Cy Twombly. Educated in the United States, he was significantly influenced by his travels to North Africa, Spain, and Italy. In 1957, Twombly settled in Rome, where he went on to cultivate his signature gestural and calligraphic Abstraction: a language of line, trace, and ephemeral inscription that merges drawing and writing, myth and the present into a single, expressive act.

The imperfection of chance
For Twombly, printmaking remained a sporadic practice, but at the same time, one he deeply absorbed himself in. Unlike contemporaries such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, for whom graphic works paralleled their painting, Twombly understood printmaking as a field of experimentation rather than a medium for conceptual expansion. He embraced the unpredictability of intaglio techniques and allowed chance and imperfection to help shape the final work. He was convinced that the physical, immediate nature of painting could never be fully transferred to printing; yet it is precisely these small, intimate etchings that reveal the unmistakable energy of his hand, the rhythm of his line, and the fleeting quality of his script. They testify to Twombly's masterful command of line, his poetic gestural abstraction, and the quiet depth with which he approaches his paintings.




Lines of autonomy
Twombly's first portfolio, released by the distinguished fine art print publisher Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Sketches (1967-1975), was created after a visit to the ULAE printshop on Long Island with Robert Rauschenberg. Inspired by his fellow artist and the publisher Tatyana Grosman, Twombly threw himself into printmaking over the following months, working with master printer Donn Steward and creating a prolific output that included the present 'Sketches' series. Today, this series is scarce on the international art market, with copies in significant public collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The portfolio, comprising six etchings, reveals Twombly's fascination with the gesture of writing as a visual form: curved glyphs, abstract symbols and letters, and intertwined lines evoke everything from scribbles and doodles to mathematical notations, without conveying any literal meaning or narrative context. The compositions combine spontaneous gestures with a rigorous exploration of the technical potential of the printing plate, resulting in prints that exude both the immediacy of the hand and the permanence of the engraved mark. As Twombly reflected a year earlier: "Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realization. The imagery is one of the private or separate indulgences rather than an abstract totality of visual perception..." (Cy Twombly, 1966, quoted from Cy Twombly. A Retrospective, MoMA, New York 1994, p. 27) [KA]