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Nine Discourses on Commodus

Like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly employed the Abstract Expressionists' liberating, aleatory use of paint, but without their heroic pretensions or universalist goals. Twombly and his colleagues utilized an iconography of everyday life (such as representations of numbers and letters) and incorporated found objects into their work, embracing banal methods such as stencilling. The suggestion of carelessness and defilement inherent in Twombly's paintings (they elicit comparisons with the sexual graffiti in a public latrine) is also present in the work of Rauschenberg, with whom Twombly travelled to Italy in 1953.

In 1957 Twombly settled in Rome, where he inspired a small school of calligraphic painters. Some of the main elements of his mature works- the graffiti-like writing on the surface that suggests a wall, and an emphasis on the material properties of his mediums- dovetail with the leading concerns of continental painters, particulary of those associated with Arte Informale (the Italian equivalent of Art Informel). Twombly's work is filled with references to his adopted home as well as to a broader neoclassical tradition; he often alludes to mythological subjects. Old Master painters, and local places or events through his titles and scrawled words or phrases on the surfaces of the works. Idyllic landscapes and their connotation of bacchanalian pleasures have consistently provided Twombly with inspiration.

In the winter of 1963, in the city of Rome, Cy Twombly completed a cycle of nine paintings depicting the historical figure Commodus (161 - 192 AD). Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, became Emperor of the Roman Empire in 180 AD, at the head of a government that generated great instability and eventually brought about the decline of the prosperity of the Roman Empire. His tyrannical ways would give rise to conspiracies that would eventually lead to his own assassination and civil war in Rome. The esthetic composition of these paintings represents a chaotic order, intended to describe the political and social situation surrounding Commodus. The gray background common to the nine paintings acts as negative space on which the gestural action paintings are positioned. The narrative rests on the concept of the grid, as well as the inclusion of words, numbers, and calligraphy. Prior to their acquisition by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2007, these paintings had only been exhibited on two occasions. They were presented at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1964, and displayed at a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. This cycle of paintings is now regarded as a highlight of Twombly's artistic career, and of the history of postwar art.

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