Slide 1. I am going to try out three versions of  what old age art might look like,
using for examples the work of two great masters and a far lesser one,
and the images they made of procreation and death in youth, maturity and old age.

Slide 2. For the first version, I will use Martin Lindauer’s descriptors of the styles of old-age and youth
as they might apply to the work of the three artists first in their youth, and then in their old age…

Lindauer describes the youth style as “skilled… composed, follows rules, pictorially structured,”
and the  old-age style as  “thick, freely executed; bold, rough, spontaneous,”

But art only matters if it’s about something, and so I will try to suggest what the content was
that called forth those styles at those times of life.

Slide 3. For the second way of looking at the three artists, I will use some of Edward Said’s ideas
about what he calls “late style”—and his “late style” is certainly different than Lindauer’s “old-age style.”
Said says the artist’s last works may “reflect a special mode of maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity.”
or, perhaps, “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction,
a late style that involves a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness that is going against...”

“In the history of art, the late works are the catastrophes.”

Slide 4. Then, the third way of looking at our three artists today.
Not just youth and old age, but also the time in the middle… three periods, not two.

This is Giorgione’s early 16th C. view of what to do with our three lives…
youth searches and learns and the world opens and expands;
maturity is strong, successful and in charge; old age is a sage with a star chart.

The youth for a painter would be learning the tradition and the style of one’s time
and then finding one’s individual style within that period style—
and for the last hundred years, one’s individual style has been one of trying to be avant guarde...
 to lead beyond the period style of one’s time …

Maturity would be, simply, doing it—doing it full blast, beating down the competition,
in whatever form that competition might take—
other artists, other social forces, other psychic contents within the artist him or herself…

And old age—all games won, who cares what people think…
play games with everything you know… no one else knows anything anyway.   

Click to For Youth for Titian, Kollwitz and Martin