Since 1989, with few exceptions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has featured Cy Twombly’s massive cycle of ten paintings in a gallery at the very end of the Museum’s modern and contemporary art galleries. 50 Days at Iliam tells the story of the end of the Trojan War. The paintings fill the large gallery and its antechamber with a swirl of chaotic action. It is only since spending more time with the work that I realized what is happening; much like Homer’s Iliad, the viewer is dropped in medias res into a story of rage and war that is as relevant today as when it was first told.

Entering, large white canvases covered in scribbles and scratches vie for attention. A huge canvas with three large color clouds anchors the facing wall. Penciled in names and painted texts run over and on top of each other; large color splotches in reds and greys and blues take up vast territories; black lines mark out triangles and phalluses and circles while scratching out other symbols and names; white paint partially or fully effaces the rest. The names of some gods, goddesses, and heroes stand out. The effect is chaotic with no immediate sense of narrative. In place of it, there is a sense of momentum–a rush of red clockwise across the room.

The most arresting canvas to me is the fourth from the left–a giant fireball of red-orange that seems to have exploded, hovering above red script spelling out the phrase “Like a fire that consumes all before it.” In the context of battle it reads like an epic emphatic bloodsplat. While it works on that register, it works more subtly to link the story being told across the canvases as well.

Homer’s Iliad dates to roughly the 8th century BC, and Twombly–enamored with Greco-Roman mythology–closely read Alexander Pope’s 18th-century English translation. In the last fifty days of the Trojan War, the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans comes to head. The great Greeks warrior Achilles refuses to fight because he is enraged that his war booty has been taken from him by his king. The Greeks start to lose. But the Trojan prince Hector kills Achilles’s close companion Patroculus in battle. Achilles wants vengeance and returns to the fray, killing Hector and winning the war for the Greeks. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greek Army is like a fire that consumes all before it. In Pope’s introduction to his translation, Pope compares Homer’s poetry to a fire that consumes all before it. Twombly’s red paint moves across the canvases on the left side of the room, spelling out the name of Achilles and the other Greek heroes and the painted works also consume what is before them–both clockwise, as the red colors fade into the blues and greys of the dead souls of the Trojans on the right side of the room, and on the facing canvases. The Fire that Consumes All Before It faces The House of Priam, and indeed that fire, of the Greek warriors, will consume and destroy the members of the Trojan king’s house just as it visually does in the installation that Twombly creates.

The artist advised the museum on how to install his 10-painting cycle, and the current gallery has been carefully modified to fit the artist’s requirements. The first painting in the cycle–The Shield of Achilles–hangs immediately outside the gallery. It represents the gift that the nymph Thetis made for her son Achilles to protect him in battle and which was famously described in intricate detail in Homer’s Iliad. Upon entering the room, bold red script lists out the Greek army in Heroes of the Achaeans, with the words Achillles and Achaens being most prominent. Achaens are Greeks, and Ilians are Trojans. Twombly uses Greek and Roman naming conventions, and deliberately subverts conventional spellings in other ways, substituting the Greek Delta for As and mispelling “Ilium” in the title of the cycle as “Iliam”–the extra A intended as a reference to Achilles.

Even while the large white surfaces are covered in text, much of that writing is deliberately painted over or scratched out. Heroes of the Achaens is the second painting in the cycle, but Twombly pairs it visually with the last painting in the cycle, Heroes of the Ilians, by placing it on the same wall. It is thematically linked. Heroes of the Ilians is also a roll call of the characters who played a part in those last fifty days, this time those on the Trojan side. Their defeat and demise is denoted by the many erasures and the use of grey, white, and blue to evoke the cool shades of death. So too does the shamrock-like outline which recalls the color clouds that Twombly uses elsewhere to evoke shades. Shades, in the ancient Greek conception, are souls of the dead that inhabit the underworld.

Facing the red rage of the left-hand side paintings, full with the names and stories of the Achaean warriors, is a line up of the Trojan side, its warriors and goddesses and battle positions, but Twombly uses a light cyan and grey, a color linked to death, for the panels on this side. The two armies are facing off on the opposing walls. At the same time, the emotional arc of the room cycles from left to right, from rage to death. In Achaens in Battle, Twombly paints the word “artist” above what looks like a painter’s palette at the very bottom of the canvas. To me, this suggests that the artist is putting himself in a spectator’s seat for the battle, and by proxy, so are we the viewer in prime seats to watch the climax of The Iliad unfold.

Twombly paints abstract portraits of the characters in the form of color clouds in the central painting Shades of Achilles, Patroculus, and Hector. Shades of Achilles, Patroculus, and Hector hangs on the back wall, facing the viewer as you enter the gallery. It represents the culmination of the plot and the events that led to the fall of Troy, and it mediates between the red rage of the Greeks that moves toward it on the left and the blue shades of death that moves away from it on the right on the Trojan side. It is the death of Patroculus by Hector that brings Achilles back into the fray. Achilles then kills Hector, knowing that by doing so he fates himself to die.

Alexander Pope’s translation begins with the words:

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring 
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!            

But in Homer the poem begins with the word μῆνιν, or rage. Rage is the driving force of the story, and it unfurls across the Twombly’s painting like a vengeful river on the left-hand side of the gallery until it transmutes into blue-grey death on the right-hand side of the gallery. Twombly takes the gestural marks of action painting and the lessons of abstraction and applies them to a Classical theme, reopening this subject matter for contemporary art at a time when the impetus for painting was thought to come from the artist’s psyche. The old story becomes distilled to the emotional forces at work, creating a meditation on war and its causes, the grievances and vengances its nurtures, and the implacable way it moves forward once it starts. Then and now, the end is the same: Shades of Eternal Night await the warriors of those fifty days battling on the plains of Troy.