Cy Twombly: Untitled from the Bolsen series

Number 6: The sixth most expensive painting sold at auctions in 2020.

A picture combining painting, drawing and writing.

Cy Twombly, as one of the millions of spectators, watched in delight the first landing of a man on the moon and in the summer of 69 he painted this picture in the 16th-century Palazzo del Drago on Lake Bolsena in the Tuscan hills. It is an unusual reference to contemporary events and a monumental canvas at the same time. The pale background is filled with an explosion of forms, lines, dashes and vectors, and the diagonal movement of the lines resembles the flight of a rocket, giving the feeling of floating in space.

The painting belonged to the Saatchi Collection and sold for just above its lowest estimate but well below Twombly’s 2015 auction record of $ 70.5 million.

See the description of the artwork on Christie’s website.