"During the period from 1962 to 1963 Twombly's paintings and their historical referents assumed a much more somber and anxious tone, as Twombly took up a panoply of historical assassinations as his point of departure-a shift perhaps reflective of the darkening mood of the early 1960s, which witnessed the Cuban Missile crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Produced in the winter of 1963, the painting cycle Nine Discourses on Commodus serves as a summation of this agonized and singular phase in his career. The cycle is based on the cruelty, insanity, and eventual murder of the Roman emperor Aurelius Commodus (161–192 CE). Conflict, opposition, and tension dominate the paintings' composition. Two whorls of matter hold the central focus of each piece, ranging in mood from serene, cloudlike structures to bleeding wounds and culminating in a fiery apotheosis in the final panel. Despite the paintings' intrinsic aesthetics of chaos and instability, a tightly controlled armature governs their composition. The gray background acts as a negative space to counterbalance the bloody whirls of paint and scabs of congealed impasto. Over this neutral backdrop, the line that runs along the middle of the paintings serves as a guiding mark to subdivide the composition. Many of the Commodus paintings also feature numerical sequences, often articulating the grids, graphs, and geometric axes that form the paintings' skeleton.

The Commodus paintings were first exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in March 1964, appearing before an American audience still in the thrall of Pop art and Minimalism. In this context, Twombly's messy and esoteric Commodus paintings seemed severely out of place and out of date. They attracted scathing reviews, which tellingly focused on Twombly's absence from the New York art scene, implying his abandonment of the United States and carrying the distinctly chauvinistic subtext that these paintings had been imported from "old Europe." Given their intrinsic reliance on narrative and sequence, it can hardly have helped the situation that the Commodus paintings were installed in a jumbled and confused order at Castelli Gallery, leaving their overall trajectory undecipherable." (Guggenheim Bilbao)