Late?
Due to possible copyright issues images have been removed from
the original presentation. Where possible a website address to the image has been
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1986. Miles Davis: Tutu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Miles
_Davis-Tutu_%28album_cover%29.jpg
1967. John Coltrane: Expression
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colt
raneExpression.jpg
[Miles is 60 and will die five years later]
[Trane is 40 and will die six months
later]
Monet Autumn effect at Argenteuil , 1873;
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/claude-monet/autumn-effect-at-argenteuil-1873
Japanese Bridge, 1918-24
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/claude-monet/the-japanese-bridge-8-1924
Two definitions of late style
‘In some of the greatest artists, extreme old age can bring about a development which seems
to reveal the purest and most essential of their art precisely through the actual and natural
decline of their vital powers. ..While old age nibbles senselessly away at the average and
common man and destroys what is essential as well as what is useless, it is the privilege of
some great beings to be acted upon by nature according to a higher plan, so that even
where she destroys, she uses destruction to extract the eternal out of the extraneous and
the disingenuous.’
Georg Simmel (1905) ‘Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper,’ [first published in Zur Philosophie der Kunst: Philosophische und Kunstphilosophische
Aufsaetze, 1922]
’Works done in old-age style are dynamic and mutable, that is, not static or constant;
they look ahead, rather than back; they involve newer and less comprehensible forms, and
hence are unpredictable, freer, and more expressive; they are also fragmentary, without form,
sketchy, and more intense. There is disregard for clearly articulated forms.’
Joseph Gantner ‘Der Alte Kunstler’ from Georg Kauffmann et al. Festschrift fur Herbert von Einmen, 1965, pp. 71-6
Artists deemed by art historians to have a recognisable late style
Titian (agreed by 83% of the respondents)
Cézanne, Constable, Degas, De Kooning, Goya (75%)
Matisse, Michelangelo, Mondrian, Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt (67%)
Braque, Corot, David, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Renoir, Turner (50%)
Corinth, El Greco, Hals, Klee, Nolde, Poussin, Rothko (42%)
Bacon, Botticelli, Chagall, De Chirico, Dali, Delacroix, Derain, Eakins, Fragonard, Gainsborough,
Homer, Vuillard (33%)
From Martin S. Lindauer Aging, Creativity, and Art: A Positive Perspective on Late-Life Development (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum
Publishers, 2003, p. 175.
Titian Pietà c.1576.
Gallerie dell'Accademia , Venice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tizian_053.jpg
JMW Turner Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1845). Tate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_-_Norham_Castle,_Sunrise__WGA23182.jpg
'Strengths and weaknesses of ‘late style’or‘late work for a critical
understanding of the impact of old age and proximity to death on creative
activity'
Strengths:
• Possibility of new analytic approaches – mainly psychological
• Positive role models challenging casual gerontophobia
Weaknesses
• Revisiting the trope of Genius
•Non-finito
•Identification of art as principally expressive
•Gender bias
•Lack of historical context
•Assertion of unvarying artistic agency
•Valorisation of avant-garde
• Contingency of author’s productive context
• The corruption of the art market
Individual and collective experience, representation and production of late
life creativity
‘Let it be a source of consolation, if not of triumph, in a long studious life of true
genius, to know that the imagination may not decline with the vigour of the frame
which holds it. There has been no old age for many men of genius.’
Isaac Disraeli Amenities of Literature, 1841
‘The understanding and the higher powers of the mind, up to a certain epoch at least,
and often to the very latest period allotted to the life of man, preserve, if they do not
actually acquire, increased energy and precision. More slow in reaching maturity,
reason and judgement have scarcely attained their highest development before the
signs of bodily decay appear. Still gaining by daily experience and continual exercise,
these faculties long retain their solidity, pre-eminence, perfection, power, and
influence, individually and socially.’
Daniel Maclachlan A Practical treatise on the Diseases and Infirmities of Advanced Life 1863
‘It is a time of peace and contentment which had not existed in the previous life and
this condition therefore must also produce particular effects which correspond to this
particular state.’
Jacob Grimm 1863 lecture to Royal Academy of Sciences, Berlin
Value of exploration of late artistic ability
• Charting wider changes in attitudes to aging, as represented in the reception
history of so-called late work
• Subjecting ‘late work’, ‘late style’ and cognate terms to a similar level of
scrutiny as other descriptive/evaluative phrases in the critical/historical
lexicon
• Challenging a complacent art history to look again at the normative
assumptions that discriminate between periods in artists’ careers
• Fostering interdisciplinary research within the humanities and between the
humanities, social sciences and medicine
• Opening possibilities for cross-cultural comparisons between Western and
other artistic traditions with respect to late-life creativity
Emotional/neurological impacts of old age and their effect on creativity
Unless the work of art is avowedly confessional, how do we avoid the problem of ‘reading in’
the impact of old age when proposing an analysis of the emotional /neurological context for the
work’s production?
The data provided by medical/psychological reports (if such exist) very rarely explain creative
production adequately (with the possible exception of some works produced under observation
by patients suffering psychosis). The work of art is conditioned by more than this.
Nevertheless, we may assume that there are sufficient human constants in aging to allow a
certain amount of insight into the aging process and its possible impact on late-life creativity.
The question for research must therefore be not to see late-life creativity as determined by the
emotional/neurological impacts of old age, but instead to see the emotional/neurological
developments associated with old age as having some explanatory potential in certain cases.
Even where such impacts can be detected, there is no necessary reason that an artist’s last
works will exhibit a distinctive formal aesthetic we would want to identify as ‘late style.’
Nicolas Poussin Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_052.jpg
The Deluge, 1660-64
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nicolas_Poussin_046.jpg
After 1630 began to suffer from hand tremors, variously ascribed to Parkinson’s disease
or to Neurosyphilis. Died 1665, aged 71.
Lovis Corinth Self-portrait with Skeleton, 1896;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lovis_Corinth_010.jpg
Last Self-portrait, 1925
http://www.artsunlight.com/artist-NC/N-C0017-Lovis-Corinth/N-C0017-0080-last-selfportrait.html
Corinth suffered a right-hemispheric stroke in 1911 aged 53 years; died 1925 at 67
Renoir Bathers, 1918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PierreAuguste_Renoir_125.jpg
Developed severe rheumatoid arthritis c. 1898;
died 1919 aged 78.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheumatoid_arthritis