Nine Discourses on Commodus, Part V 1963

Cy Twombly made this painting, “Nine Discourses on Commodus, Part V”, with a flurry of marks and a muted palette of greys, reds, and yellows. You can almost feel the push and pull of the artist's hand, how the painting came into being through shifting layers, intuition, and maybe a little bit of chance. I can imagine Twombly standing in front of the canvas, maybe wrestling with it, trying to coax something into being. Look at the way the colors bleed and blend together, the thickness and thinness of the paint. That swooping gesture of white, how it seems to float and dissolve into the grey ground – it's like a question mark, or a whisper. There’s a sense of history and time passing, not unlike a Roman ruin. Twombly’s always in conversation with other artists and the past. You see it in his looping lines, his scribbles, and how he builds up surfaces, which feel so free and spontaneous. Painting is a form of embodied expression, it embraces ambiguity, and leaves room for multiple voices and interpretations.