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The critic at seventy-five - art critic
Art Journal, Spring, 1994 by Hugo Munsterberg
When I was sixty-five years old, I wrote a book on artistic creativity in old age.(1) Now, a decade later, I can look back on it from what Jung called old age, a time which he believed could be a fruitful and even creative period--indeed, a period which for many people becomes the culmination of life. Though Nietzsche never reached old age, he showed remarkable insight when he wrote, "Every period of life understands the 'truth' after its own fashion."(2) In my experience, old age is a time when great passion dies down and tensions diminish. A more serene mood begins to prevail as the obsessions and concerns of younger years disappear, and as Nietzsche suggests, one's outlook on life differs not only from that of youth but even from that of a decade ago.
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With artists, this late phase of life sometimes results in what German scholars call an Altersstil, an old-age style that reflects a simpler, more spiritualized vision. The age at which it begins, however, is not the same for every person. For example, Rembrandt, who died at sixty-three, started his Altersstil around sixty, but Michelangelo, who lived until his ninetieth year, evolved his late style when he was in his eighties. The same phenomenon is found in the old-age work of other great artists, notably Titian, J.M.W. Turner, and Beethoven who created some of his finest and most profound music in the last years of his life. Another striking example is Goethe, who put the finishing touches on Faust shortly before his death at the age of eighty-two.
Among the artists of the twentieth century, one thinks first of all of Henri Matisse. In his seventies and eighties, when his hands become too crippled to hold a brush, he produced wonderful collages made of cut-out paper shapes, working in a simplified style, all excess stripped away. The late works of Pierre Bonnard, executed when he was in his seventies, are among his best creations, and while not everyone admires the final oeuvre of Pablo Picasso, no one can deny that he possessed astonishing vitality in his old age, pouring out a stream of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints; there is even a school of critical opinion which has reevaluated his late work, arguing that it represents a distinctive old-age style.
Of present-day artists, the Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning provides the most interesting example. Now eighty-seven years old, his mind has gone, and yet he not only continues to paint, he is turning out masterly works in a completely different manner, for the dynamic energy and emotional tension which characterized his earlier work have given way to a more tranquil, more spiritual style. In writing about de Kooning's late work, Robert Rosenblum describes it very well:
In a prolific flow of large canvases, he pruned the jungle-like density of his acres and decades of painting experience to an ethereal simplicity. Often, the late styles of many of the old masters--Titian, Rembrandt, Turner--are characterized by a triumph over matter, whether the stuff of paint, or the palpability of people and things; and the works of this modern octogenarian now enter, too, this otherworldly realm, where angels no longer fear o tread.(3)
Other artists, although never developing a true old-age style, remain very productive to the end of their lives. For example, the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo continued to produce canvases of great power and beauty until his death at ninety-one, while Robert Motherwell, one of the last surviving members of the Abstract Expressionist generation, had just had an exhibition of recent paintings and was preparing a major show of his work when he died at the age of seventy-six. Among living artists, one thinks of the French painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), who has created fine work in his old age, such as the lovely pictures of his Japanese wife.
Since all these artists could look back upon long, fruitful careers, the work of their last years represents the final development of their artistic talent. At the opposite extreme are the artists who did not begin until late, after a lifetime devoted to other pursuits. Most of these are so-called naive or primitive artists, the best-known and most remarkable being Grandma Moses. These artists are usually self-taught. Although their work is technically awkward, at its best it combines a certain naivete with a freshness that more sophisticated art by its very nature can never possess.
What distinguishes these artists from academically trained painters is summed up by Gary Schwindler in his catalogue for the Interface show: "The self-taught artist regards content as the most important aspect of the art-making process; use of materials, and technical and formal considerations are always in the service of content, and come into play largely through intuition, instinct, and circumstance."(4) Be it Bill Traylor, to whom I dedicated my book on old-age creativity, a man who was born a slave in Alabama, began painting at eighty-five, and produced delightful pictures of people and animals during the rest of his long life; or William Hawkins, also a black painter, who made detailed pictures of cityscapes, most of them in Columbus, Ohio; or the southern folk painter Theodora Hamblatt, who portrayed the people and scenery of her native Oxford, Mississippi; or Harry Lieberman, a Polish Jewish immigrant who, after a career in the confectionery business, took up painting at seventy-six and went on producing art for the next twenty-seven years--they all created works which are marked by a fresh and unselfconscious simplicity. And like Henri Rousseau, the greatest of these primitive artists, they thought of themselves as realists, whether they painted what they saw or what they imagined.
