Reaching for the stars

In a busy week of New York sales, Femme à la Montre, part of the collection that the late Emily Fisher Landau formed with an insurance payout, becomes the second most expensive Picasso ever sold at auction

- Huon Mallalieu

CY TWOMBLY (1928-2011) is an artist who does not so much divide as violently cleave opinions. For many years, I have tried to understand the loops, swirls and splashes for which he was best known and I have failed almost entirely, but many judges whose opinions are to be respected, including David Sylvester, Nicholas Cullinan and Tacita Dean, rate them highly.

Twombly liked to place himself with Poussin as an interpreter of classical mythology, but it is not always easy to see why. For the cataloguer of his typically vast, 104 %4in by 79in Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version II) at Christie's New York (Fig 1), it might track the upward flight-path of spirit in rapture, or a cataclysm of debauched violence' and the vivid crimson could, indeed, bring blood-frenzied bacchanals or the pavement afterlife of a chicken tikka masala to mind, but without the inscription-not a title, of course-would one really get it? That did not trouble the buyer, who paid a low-estimate $19.96 million (about $16.25 million) for it in Christie's evening 21st-century sale last month.

If I happened to seek a swirly work, rather than Twombly, I would have considered Joan Mitchell's 97/2in by 86½in canvas dating from about 1959, another Untitled, priced $29.16 million (about £23.7 million), also at Christie's (Fig 4). Mitchell said that, although she could never mirror Nature, she painted from remembered landscapes that I carry with me' and I find that much easier to see in her work than any mythology in Twombly's.