Note III

Cy Twomblys Note III from 1967 is an etching on orange-buff laid paper that belongs to the same series as Note IV, extending the artists investigation of the print as a vehicle for the most ephemeral and intimate forms of notation. Where Note IV suggests a fragment of writing, Note III offers an even more reduced field of marks: a few loops and scrawls that hover between drawing and writing, legibility and abstraction, on the warm ground of the colored paper. The Note series as a whole represents Twomblys most radical engagement with printmaking, a medium he approached with the same refusal of technical virtuosity that characterized his painting practice. The etchings are deliberately unpretentious: the marks are not polished or corrected but allowed to stand as traces of a gesture that may or may not have been intended to produce meaning. The orange-buff paper provides a tonal warmth that distinguishes these prints from the cold formality of white paper, suggesting the intimate, domestic context of actual notes: shopping lists, phone numbers, fragments of overheard conversation. By titling the works Notes, Twombly places them in the category of the provisional and the discardable, the kind of written material that is normally thrown away rather than framed and collected, a gesture that ironizes the art market even as the works themselves enter it.

The Note series printings are key documents of the dematerialization of the art object in the 1960s, demonstrating that the rare and the ephemeral could coexist in the same physical object. Twomblys prints from this period have influenced artists working in conceptual and post-conceptual modes who seek to make work that resists commodification through formal reduction.

An etching by Twombly from his Notes series that reduces mark-making to a minimum on warm orange-buff paper, invoking the ephemeral quality of jottings and reminders while transforming the humblest form of writing into fine art.