The Song of the Border-Guard

On Robert Rauschenberg’s advice, Cy Twombly spent two summers and a winter in the early 1950s studying at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was there that he met three artists who deeply influenced his art, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, and Franz Kline. In their work, he encountered two approaches that became fundamental to his own style: bold, insistent mark making and voids that are fully active. It was at Black Mountain College that Twombly made his first print, this woodcut on vibrantly colored paper, which was intended to accompany Robert Duncan’s poem “Song of the Border Guard.”