Twombly—a figure of great importance in postwar American art who spent most of his career outside of the country—gained renown in the 1960s and '70s for works on paper and paintings that refreshed the language of abstract expressionism of the American mid-century with gestural, lyrical mark-making as well as literary allusions that spoke to a layered, cultured past. His works evoked the ruins of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt while also speaking to a more recent art history of experimentation as represented by dada and surrealism—both movements that he greatly admired. The present example, a substantial, nearly human-scaled bronze cast from an original made of found pieces of wood. The work could be read as an abstract form; it also evokes the diagonal verticals of the hieratic figures of Ancient Egyptian sculpture that the artist greatly admired.

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