Thoughts about "Old Age Style,"
and other thoughts about "Late Style"
from a paper delivered at the symposium
"Styles of Aging and Dying, Artistic Production in Late Life"
at the American Psychological Association Convention
August 20, 2007 in San Francisco.
Click a section of interest, or start at the beginning
and go clear through (there are 27 slides total).
This Section
Is Maturity
1.
Introduction
2. Youth
3. Maturity
4. Old Age

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Slide 10.
Titian, Self Portrait in 1562. He is 77.
Titian is 77, and as Vasari wrote, “There was almost no
famous lord, nor prince, nor great woman, whom he did not paint."
And the Emperor himself had called Titian the “Prince of Painters.”
As for Lindauer’s descriptors for style, I think the
painting exemplifies neither youth’s style of “…refined, stylistic,
skilled, finicky,”
nor the old-age style of “thick… rough, spontaneous, suggestive… technique
is impatient…”
So, this must be Titian’s middle period, the time when
artists are doing it full blast, knocking down the competition…
even other artists called the Titian of these years “a sun among small
stars.”
And as for Said’s “Late Style,” well, Titian still has 23
years to live.
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Slide 11.
Self Portrait, 1904. She is 37.
. Take a look at
maturity almost 400 years later for Kathe Kollwitz in Germany.
Kollwitz is in her late 30’s.
“I became acquainted with the difficulties and tragedies
underlying proletarian life,
when I met the women who came to my husband’s clinic for help and so,
incidentally, came to me.
I was gripped by the full force of the proletarian condition...
After a time, I began to make a weekly lithograph describing their lives
for the satirical periodical Simplicisimus.”
She made at least a hundred, of these
lithographs,
and her protest against the horror, cruelty and hopelessness of the
proletarian condition
was seen each week by tens of thousands of people.
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Slide 12.
Self Portrait as Herm, 1982. Drypoint, 60 x
40 inches.
Look at my own maturity and achievement in 1960’s-80’s
San Francisco.
In 1982 the opportunity came to make a very large drypoint
as a self portrait.
I made this of myself as a herm—a Greek fertility emblem to mark the
corners of a field.
The head broken off, a broken wing (herms never had wings),
the erect phallus wound with ribbon (the herm always had an erection as
the sign of fertility),
the solar plexus as the sun, a winged heart and a vagina are just visible
carved in the stone…
I had become Director of the College of
The San Francisco Art Institute
in 1965,
doubled the enrollment and added a new building to double the space,
had my “mid-career” retrospective at SFMOMA in 1973,
and resigned my position at SFAI in 1975 because, as I told my self,
"Why am I doing all this administration stuff? I am an artist, damn it!."
After that, I taught temp spots in five different art departments,
had written for ArtForum and Art International,
and at the time I made this print was writing a bi-weekly column for Art
Week.
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Slide 13.
We have seen what each of our three
artists did with their maturity, each in their way to conquer the world.
But now it’s old age…
We’ve looked at three artists
at the moment of graduation when they had learned their lessons, found
their vision and set out to conquer the world.
And we have seen at least a little of what each one did with that maturity
to conquer their particular world.
But now it’s old age… and to each of us in whatever form of triumph we
may have, may come also that other—
the down—turn of fortunes’ wheel…
[next slide]
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