{"id":15700,"date":"2023-11-09T18:53:29","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T18:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=15700"},"modified":"2023-11-09T18:53:29","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T18:53:29","slug":"late-art-and-hackney-diamonds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2023\/11\/09\/late-art-and-hackney-diamonds\/","title":{"rendered":"Late Art and Hackney Diamonds"},"content":{"rendered":"

The theme of \u2018late art\u2019 was recently explored by the art historian Carel Blotkamp in The End: Artists\u2019 Late and Last Works<\/a><\/em> <\/span>(2019) focusing on the visual arts, but in an age nonspecific way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Raphael\u2019s \u2018Transfiguration\u2019 is central to the argument of the book. After Raphael\u2019s death, the author notes his body was laid out beneath the painting in his studio. Vasari tells us that \u2018the sight of his dead body and this living painting filled the soul of everyone looking on with grief.\u2019<\/p>\n

Raphael died aged just over thirty years of age. Picasso in a much later blasphemous parody had Raphael fucking. More on Picasso and indeed fucking later. This is an article about The Rolling Stones after all.<\/p>\n

More representative of late art in literary terms is Thomas Mann\u2019s Doctor Faustus<\/em> 1947, which was written when he was nearly eighty years of age, and was his second to last work. The last being Felix Krull<\/em>, both of which were discussed in a previous article for Cassandra Voices<\/span><\/a>. In these works his style loosens and is fresher than his earlier work. I attribute this revitalisation to his hatred of fascism and fakery.<\/p>\n

Both of these books were written in old age when the light was dimming, which is remarkable. Great art arrived against the odds, with physical and presumably mental powers failing. Like Michelangelo finishing off the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel with the Last Judgment or even more so the late sculptures.<\/p>\n

Picasso approaching ninety, as the aforementioned book references, famously started working faster and faster, painting in a sketch-like figurative way: parodies, exhumations of the western tradition such as by Valazquez Los Meninas; in contextual or parodic form; painting as ideas with the clock against him. He famously said in this respect: \u2018I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say.\u2019<\/p>\n

Well, what a drag it is getting old.<\/p>\n

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heatfield with Crows — oil on canvas 101×50 cm Auvers june 1890.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More commonly\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But Mann and Picasso are uncommon. More commonly, artists repeat earlier tropes or descend into sentimentality, commercial opportunism or simply kitsch<\/em> as they age. The late works of Marc Chagall and Salvador Dal\u00ed fall into these categories. Opera Designs or endless recycled Kitsch is very evident in the Dali Museum in his hometown of Figures.<\/p>\n

The phrase \u2018late style\u2019 is also relevant in this context and is, in fact, culled from Theodor Adorno\u2019s 1937 essay on Beethoven. Adorno \u2013 and, more recently, Edward Said, whose own last book was on late style \u2013 both suggest in a distinct echo of Picassos observations that regularity, precision, and tidiness no longer matter when an artist is faced with death. The writing and painting become more scabrous, irreverent with a lightness and incompleteness but also harrowed.<\/p>\n

One thinks above all else of the finest achievement in the history of art the late paintings of Rembrandt, where the artist is merciless in self-portrait particularly his damaged and aged eyes. Though the formal precision is, remarkably, retained. Another notable achievement is in the late work of Goya, his Black Paintings In particular. These are visceral images of human torture, misery, cannibalism, and insanity.<\/p>\n

Adorno wrote that late art or style \u2018does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.\u2019<\/p>\n

Many great artists of course die young and without the necessary anticipation of doom. Egon Schiele tragically dies in the \u2018Spanish\u2019 Flu Pandemic of 1919-1920. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned after a boat accident. So, the suddenness of a departure does not affect the art for good or ill.<\/p>\n

Van Gogh hadn\u2019t reached the age of forty, when he died, but the Wheatfield with Crows is one of his greatest works, the crows above providing a doom-laden portent. In contrast, the truly writer of The Great Gatsby <\/em>F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead by forty-four having been dismissed as a burn out and a has been. He had felt compelled to hack for money, with the Pat Hobby stories. As he said there are no second acts in American life, although Donal Trump might disagree!<\/p>\n

Some artists try and go out on top before retreating into isolation. Neither Harper Lee nor the reclusive J. D. Salinger published much after To Kill Mockingbird<\/em> and The Catcher on the Rye<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We might tentatively say that generally the best work comes first or close to first, before decline sets in, often with coincident celebrity and accolades. The philosopher J\u00fcrgen Habermas<\/a> <\/span>once remarked that when they shower you with awards you know you are finished. Stressed vines make the best grapes by all accounts.<\/p>\n

In this respect The Nobel Prize is often the kiss of death for creativity. Exceptions to that rule are of course Gabriel Marquez. He wrote as good if not a greater novel than One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/em>(1967) after the award with Love in The Time of Cholera<\/em> (1985). And then there is the incomparable Samuel Beckett<\/span><\/a>, about whom more later.<\/p>\n

Kurosawa the great Japanese film director was effectively persecuted by the Japanese state by being snubbed at awards ceremony. Suicide attempt followed, and but for the intervention of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas he would not have gone on to produce a work as incandescently brilliant as Ran<\/a><\/span>, his Samurai adaption of King Lear, which is one of the greatest films of all time that he completed at nearly eighty years of age.<\/p>\n