Letter of Resignation consists of 38 individual drawings, which Cy Twombly created between the years 1959 and 1967 in Rome. While all of the drawings begin with Twombly's signature pencil line, many of the works are layered with heavily encrusted house paint and crayon.
Although Twombly has enjoyed critical acclaim in recent years, at the time these drawings were made, both his practice and his formal and thematic preoccupations stood in stark contrast to the dominating pop iconography and the certainties of Minimalist form. In the work of the 1950s and 60s, Twombly vehemently sustained painterly abstraction, while embracing such high Western cultural contributions as the written word, counting systems, geometry and ideographic signs.