Summarizing a body of recent research, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that artists who succeed in their youth tend to be conceptual. Like Picasso, they start with a concept of what they want to achieve and then execute it. Those that thrive near the end of life tend to be exploratory. Like Cezanne, they don’t start with clear conceptions, but go through a process of trial and error that eventually leads them to a destination.
This is not always a passive, gentle process. In 1972 the great art historian Kenneth Clark wrote an essay on what he called the “old-age style.” Looking across the arts, and especially at Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Turner, and Cezanne, he believed he could detect a common pattern that many great elderly artists shared: “A sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.… If we consider old-age art from a more narrowly stylistic point of view, we find a retreat from realism, an impatience with established technique and a craving for complete unity of treatment, as if the picture were an organism in which every member shared in the life of the whole.
This is not always a passive, gentle process. In 1972 the great art historian Kenneth Clark wrote an essay on what he called the “old-age style.” Looking across the arts, and especially at Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Turner, and Cezanne, he believed he could detect a common pattern that many great elderly artists shared: “A sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.… If we consider old-age art from a more narrowly stylistic point of view, we find a retreat from realism, an impatience with established technique and a craving for complete unity of treatment, as if the picture were an organism in which every member shared in the life of the whole.
