Untitled, New York

Untitled is among Cy Twombly’s best-known and earliest sculptures. Once painted stark white, it is now evocatively weathered. The work presents a fence-like array of wooden spoon handles and other shafts of wood that were wrapped together with bands of cloth and mounted on a miniature stepped platform. It can be variously read—either separately or simultaneously—as depicting a powerful “fetish” object, a set of mute panpipes, or an unidentified archaeological fragment. Twombly made this assemblage in New York City after formative travels in both Italy and North Africa; fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg, who had traveled with him, kept the work in his personal collection for more than fivedecades.