Title: Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), ca. 2010
Artist: Cy Twombly
Year: 2025
Medium Type: Poster | Poster on paper
Frame: Unframed

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Cy Twombly
American, 1928–2011

Cy Twombly (b. Lexington, Virginia, 1928; d. Rome, Italy, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer best known for large-scale canvases in which calligraphic marks, gestural scribbles, and fragmentary classical text coexist — a singular style that positioned him as one of the most influential abstract artists of the postwar era. His Blackboard paintings, beginning in 1966, stripped the canvas to looping chalk-like marks on gray grounds and are among the most studied works in the history of American abstraction.

Twombly studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1948–1949; the Art Students League of New York in 1950; and Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina, in 1951–1952, where he worked alongside Robert Rauschenberg and encountered the influence of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. He settled permanently in Rome, Italy, in 1957. Mediterranean myth, ancient history, and classical poetry — particularly the work of Virgil, Sappho, and Keats — became enduring subjects in paintings such as Leda and the Swan (1962, oil, house paint, crayon, and pencil on canvas, 75 × 79 in.) and the nine-part Fifty Days at Iliam series (1978, oil, oil crayon, and graphite on canvas), now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

No apparent condition issues noted.