Why is the arts world so fixated with youth?
In a week’s time a new festival opens at the Southbank celebrating the creativity of old age. Over six days of talks and performances, (B)old aims to challenge the cliché that art is the preserve of the young. Not only that, it aims to explode the myth that only the young are capable of being edgy, bold and iconoclastic. Rather than cast the older artist as youth’s polar opposite, a mature figure made wise by experience, (B)old refreshingly sets out another point of view: that artists past middle age are just as capable of creating art that is rebellious, turbulent, passionate, and full of struggle.
Thus among the programme highlights is the late-night “(B)old’s After Show Party”, which celebrates the idea that one should grow old disgracefully. Meanwhile the line-up of featured artists includes the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, and we can be pretty sure it won’t be “seasoned wisdom” she’s offering. Nor can you expect anything gentle from reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, or legendary drag queen Lavinia Co-op. True, revered pianist Alfred Brendel, another featured artist, might be thought of as “wise”. But don’t let’s forget his naughty and often lustful poetry, and his delight at discovering that his name “Brendel” is also the name of a German folk-devil.
These artists remind us that the fires of passion do not die down in old age, and it’s only the conceit of youth, which thinks wrinkled skin must be a sign of wrinkled passions, that would entertain such a condescending view. In one of his late poems, Yeats says: “You think it horrible that lust and rage/Should dance attention upon my old age/They were not such a plague when I was young;/What else have I to spur me into song?” Here, Yeats suggests that it might actually be the other way about; rather than fading with age, emotions take on a sharp poignancy from the thought of impending mortality and missed opportunities.
So if the art of old age is marked neither by serenity nor by nosethumbing radicalism, what exactly is the quality that makes it special? I would say it’s a clear-eyed view of the world, based on long, close observation, coupled with a mastery of the craft that comes with decades of practice. Older artists are not interested in fomenting artistic revolutions or movements. They don’t write strident manifestos. They just get on with the job, day after day, honing and refining what they do with a patience that amounts to heroism.
Take the Japanese artist Hokusai, who at the age of 70 declared: “I have finally learned how to paint a leaf.” Or the late sculptor Louise Bourgeois, one of the most astonishing examples of creativity peaking in old age. When asked in 1995 why she thought her recent work was better than her earlier work, she said: “I was not sophisticated enough then. You know, artists improve. I mean, we are supposed to be better today than we were 20 years ago. Otherwise, what’s the use of working?”
This patient honing doesn’t rule out radicalism. On the contrary, some creative artists have produced their most radical work late in life. JMW Turner produced his most modernist canvases from the age of 60. Monet’s late waterlilies are the most modernist works he produced. Stravinsky had a change of direction in his mid-Seventies, producing a body of work that marries vast experience, a huge awareness of music’s past, and a radically modernist technique.
Just as old age is no bar to astonishing originality, it can also admit stormy feelings. The work produced late in life may be dark and angry, as in Paul Klee’s late works, it may be comic, as in Verdi’s Falstaff, it may be radical or conservative. What counts is the largeness of vision, coupled with the refinement of experience.
The wisest observation on the wisdom of age comes from the American poet Robert Frost. “Young people have insight,” he declared. “They have a flash here and a flash there. It is like the stars coming out in the early evening. They have flashes of light. It is later in the dark of life that you see forms, constellations. And it is the constellations that are philosophy.”