Last week was my 67th birthday, so Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph, by Richard Lacayo and published today, seemed to be a vitalizing choice.
The book gives a quick sweeping overview of artists who have worked to a ripe old age.
It’s surprising how many artists have lived well past seventy. Even in centuries when life expectancy, held in check by bad hygiene, poor nutrition, and guessing-game medicine, was a fraction of what it is now, they often made it to a remarkable age. For every Raphael or Van Gogh who left this world in his or her thirties, there’s a very long A-list of artists who reached their eighties and nineties, And older….
Better still, many of those men and women remained productive to the end. Almost by definition artists are people who spend a lifetime doing what they love. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Coming af Age, her book-length examination of later life: “There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning...social, political, intellectual or creative work.” If it’s true, as some researchers tell us, that contentment correlated with longevity, is it any surprise that the people who do this kind of thing for a living rarely retire? “Happiness is work.” Words the aging Paul Cézanne fixed to the wall of his studio in Provence.
Throughout history, countless artists have lived in accord with Cézanne’s motto. Crippled by arthritis, the elderly Auguste Renoir went on painting with his hands strapped tightly on bandages. On the day before he died he completed a still life. Until nearly the end of her long life, in 2010, Louise Bourgeois drew almost every day. (Or night—she was an insomniac and drawing helped her sleep.) Around 12515, the year before he died, Giovanni Bellini produced his first full-length nude, an elegant young woman coolly appraising her own charms in a hand-held mirror. He was eighty-five when he had the pleasure of revisiting her image regularly in his studio, gently touching her up with his brush.
But the book then develops its themes by focusing on six artists: the Italian Renaissance painter Titian; Francisco José de Goya, Spanish painter of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries; the French painters Claude Monet and Henri Matisse, from the 19th and 20th Centuries; the 20th Century American painter Edward Hopper; and the 20th Century American sculptor Louise Nevelson.
Lacayo is looking for artists who went big in their final years, both literally and metaphorically, rather than artists who seemed on autopilot in their later years. Titian’s late turn to a loose, hectic slashing style of brushwork visually bewildered his contemporaries, but today is one of the most appreciated examples of his genius. Likewise, Monet’s climactic panoramic series of water lilies had his contemporaries wondering if the artist’s cataracts had diminished his abilities. Today, these monumental works are lauded as precursors of abstract expressionism and other 20th Century art movements. The amazing paper-cut art that Matisse turned to in his later years was dismissed by many as childish, “an agreeable distraction,” in the words of French critic Christian Zervos.
There is a thread of ageism running through much of the criticism older artist receive for perceived changes in their styles. It must be cataracts, the arthritic hands can’t hold a brush well, the chronic pain has darkened their worldview, not as sharp as they used to be. One of Titian’s contemporaries, Giorgio Vasari, called the painter’s late work ‘pittura a maccia’—‘patchy painting’—and attributed it to the artist’s failing faculties, the weak eyes and shaky hands. But art historians now view Titian’s later work to be a choice, a brilliant evolution that added a dimension to painting, using the texture of oil paint to add a new dimension to the canvas, freeing it from the flat, mannered canvases that predominated before. There are hints of this style in some of his earlier work, as well as examples of more traditional brushstroke in his late period. No, it was a choice, a breaking free, an experimentation.
Lacayo notes some similarities in the artists’ late work; that aforementioned drive to ‘go big,’ for example. Monet’s Water Lilies was a monumental work that filled the space of the Orangerie in Paris. Both Goya and Matisse filled entire walls of their homes and studios with their late output. Louise Nevelson produced her largest sculptures yet.
But mostly, the book takes a deep dive into the lives and work of his six chosen artists, and the different challenges and responses they produced. Goya seemed as driven by the ravages of the politics of his era as by the ravages of his ageing. His intense series of Black Paintings were produced after a couple of near-fatal illnesses, as well as his despair over humankind after the Napoleonic Wars and the turmoil in the Spanish government. And yet that was not his final artistic statement. Even later in life, as the political situation improved even as his health deteriorated, he managed to produce drawings laced with humor, and even mastered new techniques in lithography and creating ivory miniatures.
Monet suffered one of his worst bouts of artistic blockage when he turned seventy, not picking up a brush for over a year, grieving the loss of his wife. It would be a complicated path before he turned his long obsession with painting water lilies into his monumental work of stunning light. Matisse, on the other hand, found that the divide in his life at age seventy, causes by war, illness and lost love, was somehow liberating, and he adopted his new technique of paper cut-outs. His ‘Jazz’ series are joyous and playful, yet also have an undercurrent of the end of life: “That’s when you realize that that Matisse has smuggled an anxious counternarrative into this otherwise merry volume—so much that parts of Jazz feel like he’s working on variations of Death’s tart reminder to humanity: ‘et in Arcadio ego’ — ‘Even in Paradise, there I am.’”
And so it goes, as we face the challenges of growing older. A wealth of history and experience, the dread of more precarious health and of the final mystery that beckons, a measure of freedom a not-giving-a-f*ck attitude. As Matisse once said, “it took me sixty years to organize my brain.” In all, not a bad birthday read.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy, by Charlotte Van den Broeck. A counterpoint to my reviewed book, this collection of essays by the Dutch poet goes in search of buildings that were fatal to their architects—architects who either killed themselves or are rumored to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire in seventeenth-century France to a theater that collapsed mid-performance in 1920s Washington, DC, and an eerily sinking swimming pool in the author’s hometown. Drawing on a vast range of material, from Hegel and Darwin to art history, stories from her own life, and popular culture, Van den Broeck brings patterns into focus as she asks, What is that strange, life-or-death connection between a creation and its creator?
- Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics, by Michael Cohen. Trump’s former fixer takes another revealing and gossipy hatchet to his crooked ex-boss.
- Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty, by Andrew Meier. After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, in domestic politics, and in America’s criminal justice system. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how the Morgenthaus amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, from a foundation of private wealth, built a dynasty of public service. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.”
- Uniting America: How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans Together to Win World War II, by Peter Shinkle. Once upon a time, in a nation seemingly far, far away, Roosevelt appointed some Republicans to important posts in his administration, intending to build national unity. But building a coalition across party lines was a risky move that could have backfired politically. It also placed a bipartisan relationship at the center of America’s confrontation with global fascism. FDR’s Republican allies went on to play critical roles in leading the war effort, and many bills passed Congress during the war years with strong backing from both parties. Following Roosevelt’s death, Stimson continued to champion bipartisanship under President Truman in the closing chapter of the war. This alliance stands as a historic example of united leadership in a nation scarred by political division.
- No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right, by Becca Andrews. No Choice begins by shining a light on the eerie ways in which life before Roe will be mirrored in life after. The wealthy and privileged will still have access, low-income people will suffer disproportionately, and pregnancy will be heavily policed. Then, Andrews takes us to the states and communities that have been hardest-hit by the erosion of abortion rights in this country, and tells the stories of those who are most at risk from this devastating reversal of settled law.
- Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever, by Nomi Prins. It is abundantly clear that our world is divided into two very different economies. The real one, for the average worker, is based on productivity and results. It behaves according to traditional rules of money and economics. The other doesn’t. It is the product of years of loose money, poured by central banks into a system dominated by financial titans. It is powerful enough to send stock markets higher even in the face of a global pandemic and threats of nuclear war. This parting from reality has its roots in an emergency response to the financial crisis of 2008. “Quantitative Easing” injected a vast amount of cash into the economy—especially if you were a major Wall Street bank. What began as a short-term dependency became a habit, then a compulsion, and finally an addiction.
- On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World, by Sean Connolly. Tells the epic story of Irish migration, showing how emigrants became a force in world politics and religion. Starting in the eighteenth century, the Irish fled limited opportunity at home and fanned out across America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These emigrants helped settle new frontiers, industrialize the West, and spread Catholicism globally. As the Irish built vibrant communities abroad, they leveraged their newfound power—sometimes becoming oppressors themselves.
- Zarifa: A Woman's Battle in a Man's World, by Zarifa Ghafari. The author was three years old when the Taliban banned girls from schools, and she began her education in secret. She was six when American airstrikes began. She was twenty-four when she became mayor – one of the first female mayors in the country – and first of Wardak, one of the most conservative provinces in Afghanistan. An extremist mob barred her from her office; her male staff walked out in protest; assassins tried to kill her three times. Soon to be a Netflix documentary, In Her Hands, executive produced by Hilary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton.
- Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions, by Temple Grandin. A quarter of a century after her memoir, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Grandin draws on cutting-edge research to take us inside visual thinking. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously believed, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the photo-realistic object visualizers like Grandin herself, with their intuitive knack for design and problem solving, to the abstract, mathematically inclined “visual spatial” thinkers who excel in pattern recognition and systemic thinking. She also makes us understand how a world increasingly geared to the verbal tends to sideline visual thinkers, screening them out at school and passing over them in the workplace.
- Paris and Her Cathedrals, by R. Howard Bloch. Six of the most sublime cathedrals in the penumbra of Paris—Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame, Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle, Amiens, Reims—are illumined in magnificent detail as Bloch, taking us from the High Middle Ages to the devastating fire that set Notre-Dame ablaze in 2019, traces the evolution of each in turn. Written from the premise that “seeing is enhanced by knowing,” each chapter is organized along the lines of a walk around and then through the space of the cathedral, such that the actual or virtual visitor feels the rich sweep of the church, “the essence of these architectural wonders” (Antonia Felix).
- Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Life, the Times, and the Rolling Stones: The Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts, by Paul Sexton. Another Stones bio, Watts joined the Rolling Stones in 1963, a few months after their formation, and he didn’t miss a gig, album or tour in his 60 years in the band. In that time, he went through band bust-ups, bereavements and changes in personnel, managers, guitarists and rhythm sections, but remained the rock at the heart of the Rolling Stones, the thoughtful, intellectual but no less compelling counterpoint to the raucousness of his bandmates Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood. And this is his story.
- Declassified: A Low-Key Guide to the High-Strung World of Classical Music, by Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch. The author blows through the cobwebs of elitism and exclusion and invites everyone to love and hate this music as much as she does. She offers a backstage tour of the industry and equips you for every listening scenario, covering: the 7 main compositional periods (even the soul-crushingly depressing Medieval period), a breakdown of the instruments and their associated personality types, what it’s like to be a musician at the highest level, how to steal a Stradivarius, and when to clap during a live performance (also: when not to). Declassified cheekily demystifies the world of High Art while making the case that classical music matters, perhaps now more than ever.
- The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were not Tragic, by William Marx. If Greek tragedies are meant to be so tragic, why do they so often end so well? Here starts the story of a long and incredible misunderstanding. Out of the hundreds of tragedies that were performed, only 32 were preserved in full. Who chose them and why? Why are the lost ones never taken into account? This extremely unusual scholarly book tells us an Umberto Eco-like story about the lost tragedies. By arguing that they would have given a radically different picture, William Marx makes us think in completely new ways about one of the major achievements of Western culture. In this very readable, stimulating, lively, and even sometimes funny book, he explores parallels with Japanese theatre, resolves the enigma of catharsis, sheds a new light on psychoanalysis. In so doing, he tells also the story of the misreadings of our modernity, which disconnected art from the body, the place, and gods.
- Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover, by Graham Boynton. The definitive biography of photographer Peter Beard, a larger-than-life icon who pushed the boundaries of art and scandalized international high society with his high-profile affairs.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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