Untitled (New York City) is one of a series of paintings in which Twombly, before leaving New York for Italy, creates out of Abstract Expressionism his own language. They are the point of departure of all of his work. Kirk Varnedoe describes them so: “[Twombly] chose graffiti-scarred walls as model sites of intersection between the urgency of graphic impulse and the authority of accreted age, the infantile and the immemorial.”