BASEL.- The Kunstmuseum Basel presents works by the American artist Cy Twombly in an exhibition that is currently on view at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst until March 13, 2016. The show focuses on paintings created between the 1950s and the 1970s from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s own collection, complemented by works on loan from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and the Daros Collection. Untitled (1969), a portrait-format painting Katharina and Wilfrid Steib donated to the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection in 2013, is making its public première in Basel.

With his close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the American artist Cy Twombly ranks among the leading exponents of a generation of artists who broke away from abstract expressionism in the 1950s to devise their own distinctive and highly influential visual idioms. Twombly was born in Lexington, Va., in 1928 and died in Rome in 2011. In 1957, at a time when the center of the art world was shifting from Paris to New York, Twombly moved in the opposite direction, settling down in Rome. There he found the light of the Mediterranean world as well as the history, myths, and poetry of antiquity that subsequently entered his oeuvre as a web of associations. With a gestural impetus, he activates usually white pictorial surfaces with letter-like scrawls: lines, symbols, and fragments of words—traces of personal recollection and collective memory manifested in a fusion of writing and image.

The exhibition turns the spotlight on paintings created between the 1950s and the 1970s from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection, complemented by loans from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and the Daros Collection, which holds a set of outstanding works by Twombly. The exemplary selection traces the creative evolution in the artist’s early oeuvre, beginning with a painting in a fairly intimate format, Untitled, that dates from 1954, before he left New York: Twombly’s roots in abstract expressionism are evident in the compact physicality of the paint and the gestural brushwork. In the pictures he paints starting in 1957—the majority are created in Rome—he stays faithful to these roots, but the dark grounds give way to luminous surfaces in large and wide formats structured by expansively rhythmical linear markings in pencil, crayon, or oil. These works would seem to bear witness to a psychological state the artist experienced as he worked on them; when he subsequently revised them, striking out elements or painting over them, the discarded forms remained visible. The overall impression is one of ambivalence between revelation and mystification.

The portrait-format painting Untitled, which was created near Lago di Bolsena north of Rome in 1969, is presented to the public for the first time. Pencil hatchings subtly suggest an aperture, perhaps a window, amid a white color field. The work, whose donation to the Kunstmuseum Basel by Katharina and Wilfrid Steib in 2013 provided a welcome occasion for the exhibition, ideally complements the museum’s existing eminent collection of Cy Twombly’s art, as the show demonstrates to great effect. The preface to the exhibition brochure outlines the collection’s history.