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…

Slide 14. Titian, Self Portrait at 90 (1576) 
                Here is Titian’s self portrait in very old age, and this is what people were saying about him…

Slide 15. The Crowning with Thorns,  (1570). Titian is 84.
                The Spanish Ambassador and Philip II’s chief art collector in Venice wrote 
“There is no doubt that Titian’s old age means that he can now produce nothing but smudges.” 

And one of Titian’s studio assistants, Palma il Giovane, reported that Titian was by then
“so old and blind that he painted more with his fingers than with the brush.” 

                What makes the disaster? It seems that Titian’s was the rotting away of the body
that we each will have unless something else kills us first.

Slide 16. The Crowning with Thorns, detail.  (1570).
                Was Titian senile?  Should he have quit? Old age rage against the dying of the light does not befit the “Prince of Painters.
                But as for the stylistic descriptors of Lindauer’s Old-Age Style… “intense… thick… bold… technique is impatient…”
                And for Edward Said’s Late Style,“…of intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?”

“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.”
                Well, that’s what both the Spanish Ambassador and the studio assistant said, and they should have known

                But for life periods when all games have been won, why care what people think—
play games with everything you know… no one else knows anything anyway.

Slide 17. Look at old age for Kathe Kollwitz. Self Portrait, 1933. Kollwitz is 66.
                For Kollwitz, the disaster was in her 47^th year when the guns of August 1914 came
and her first son—Peter—was dead by the end of October.

                She wrote in her notes, ”I do not want to die ... 
 until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seeds that were placed in me until the last small twig has grown.
This does not contradict the fact that I would have died—smilingly—for Peter… how gladly, how gladly.

                “Peter was the seed for the planting which should not have been ground.
He was at the sowing. I am the bearer and cultivator of a grain of seed corn.”

                And as for the “descriptors” for old-age style from Lindauer’s Aging…
“intense, economical, thick, freely executed; bold, rough, spontaneous, suggestive, skill and effort not obvious… technique is impatient…”
Just look at that arm.

                I guess it’s old-age style. Next year she begins The Death Series of  lithographs in what might be called Said’s “Late Style.”

                And, Hitler came to power the year she made this print.

Slide 18. Death I, Woman Giving Herself Up to Death, 1934-5.
                “I thought that now that I am really old I might be able to handle this theme [of death] in a way to plumb the depths of... but that is not the case...
At the very point when death becomes visible behind everything, it disrupts the imaginative process... 
              “I start off indecisively, soon tire, need frequent pauses and must turn for counsel to my own works from the past.
                “One can allow oneself emotional outpourings only after strenuous intellectual labors.”

                By the way, we will see the image in this print—a woman with children in her skirts—again in her last print.
Then too in her very last work she must “…return for counsel to my own works from the past.”

Slide 19. Death VIII. Death Calls, 1934-5
                Yes, Death calls, but Kathe Kollwitz still has work to do…

Slide 20. Seed for the Planting, 1942.
                It’s been almost ten years now since the 1933-34 Death Series; World War II is raging on all fronts and Kollwitz is 75.

                “I have finished my lithograph ‘Seed for the planting must not be ground.’
This time the seeds for the planting—16 year-old boys—are all around the mother, looking out from under her coat and wanting to break loose.
But the old mother who was holding them together says, no! You stay here!
For the time being you may play rough-and-tumble with one another.
But when you re grown-up you must get ready for life not for war again.”

                Is this Lindauer’s old age style of “intense, economical… freely executed, bold… suggestive, skill and effort not obvious… technique is impatient…”?
What about Said’s Late Style? Is this “… a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity”? Or is it “…intransigence, difficulty, contradiction… ”?

                Remember that Said said that  “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.”
A museum print curator once told me all Kollwitz’ prints were catastrophes because they were not art but propaganda.
However, this print and all of Kollwitz’ work is not a catastrophe except that it came too late to stop all the millennia of killings before it,
and has not been able to stop all the grinding waste of human seed in the seventy decades wars after.

Slide 21. Look at old age for Fred Martin (1927—). Untitled, November 1983. Watercolor, 40 x 30 inches. I was 56.
                I had made the very large drypoint of myself as a herm in the spring of 1983.
The disaster to my triumph came when my wife died of metastasized breast cancer a year and a half later, in November 1983.

                I made this the week after she died, and spent the next nine years myself slowly dying.

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Slide 22. (top) “Source,” February 27, 1994.
                I was 67.  Acrylic on paper, 126 x 126 inches.
                (left) “From one ear of good corn…’” 1959.
                 I was 32.Watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 inches.

                Ten years later, in the spring of 1992, I became serious about my relationship with Stephanie Dudek,
in July asked her to marry me, and we were married in December 1992.
I had found my new life, and a little over a year later had found a new way of painting to say it.

                You can’t tell from a slide like this, but the style is very “intense, economical, thick, freely executed; bold, rough and spontaneous,
suggestive, skill and effort not obvious… technique is impatient…”
And, it is also very big—10’6” x 10’6”. My soul was exploding with life. I made maybe six of these.

                And as for the source of the subject, the source of the source that is the painting’s title
—as Kathe Kollwitz said, “sometimes one must turn for counsel to one’s works from the past ”—
or in my case, must turn to that time almost forty years before when I had begun to learn what the male power means in marriage…

                “From one ear of good corn a hundred hearts are spawned (fed by its golden blood through all the waters of heaven”
I used to write those words that were filling my head onto the surface of my paintings to fill up the spaces there… 
and when I read the words now, I often recognize the lessons they meant then and I have lived since.

Slide 23. #9, May 2007.  Acrylic on paper, 44 x 30. I was 79.
Give it another dozen years, and one morning last May,
the ear of good corn and the pomegranates from a little forty year old watercolor came back…
I had begun to paint that day by writing with a big bamboo pen on the surface of the paper,
“The past is only roots long buried; the future is only a harvest yet to come. In art and life, be here always now.”

When I looked at the writing, though, I thought it was so dumb that I painted it over not only with the roots long buried
—the ear of ripe corn for man and the pomegranate for woman—
but also the harvest yet to come: the unquenchable red of life, the red hot disk of “be here now.”

Slide 24. #s 6 and 7, July 2007. A diptych, acrylic on paper, each part 44 x 30 inches. I am 80 years old.
                This is my most recent painting. It’s the male and female of that so long ago and so often repeated “Great Gate.”
She’s on the left, he’s on the right.
And she’s the vagina with the river of life, and he’s the phallus with deep in it the ineradicable red cross of life.

                As I remember the last line of Goethe’s Faust, “The eternal feminine leads us on.”
That’s why he has that ineradicable red cross carved deep in him,
hungry for the quenching in her eternal river.

                And when I had finished the two paintings that day this July and laid them side by side to dry on the studio table,
there at the bottom between them was a smear on the table from some other paintings some other time.
I saw that the smear showed the heart, the joining symbol…
the great gate I had begun to seek sixty years before.

Slide 25. And what does all this add up to?
                So, what’s it’s all add up to?

                Science has changed its mind since the 1950’s. when then it said we couldn’t, and now it says we can.
                Maybe our work will be in Lindauer’s “Old-Age Style”—‘intense, economical, thick, freely executed; bold, rough and  spontaneous,
suggestive, skill and effort not obvious… technique is impatient…’
(And we won’t talk about bad eyes and shaky hands as maybe the reasons we do it that way—
my hand shakes sometimes when I paint, and I’m having a cataract operation day after tomorrow.)
                Maybe our work will be in Said’s “Late Style”--
“…age and wisdom… a special mode of maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity…
or maybe it will be “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” 
Well, as Said remarked, it will be surely for some of us that in the history of art, our stuff will be  the catastrophes—
and that will be the art historians’ problem, not ours.

                You may remember the lines…               
“Lives of great men all remind us, we too can make our lives sublime;
and departing, leave behind us footprints in the sands of time.”

                We’ve had sandy footprints from two great artists here this morning. And what did they say? 

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