For a century or more the scientific community has fixated on not just the preservation of human life but the infinite extension of it. Google, among others, is investing huge sums of money into ways of rejigging organs, eliminating wasting diseases and generally aiming to improve on the doubling of the life expectancy we experienced between 1900-1950 when famine, many diseases, and wars were brought under control. My own family have lived well into their 90s whereas if they’d lived in the 19thcentury they would have been lucky to have seen forty while half the children born would either never have made it out of infancy or died before adolescence. While I doubt that self-induced alcoholism, depressive self-doubt or failure of imagination, are curable, we could have a variety of elderly artists still around now if science had moved a bit quicker. Picasso at 148 could still be going, Dali at 116, van Gogh at 169 years of age and Pollock, without or without the guiding hand of Lee Krasner, at 120. This raises a few interesting questions. While the sanctity of life was written into the constitution of the United Nations, it’s true that most artists did more good by dying than they probably would have done by living longer lives. The art market would no doubt agree that a sudden termination in output and thereafter scarcity it good for business.
On the other hand, in some ways, creativity can be in limited supply. No one stops being creative just because they get old but so many artists had one idea which they relentlessly flogged to death over decades with endless variations. I have always had a theory that the ideas we work with as artists are formed in adolescence, evolved in the twenties, bought to a point of maturity by the thirties and then settled into a pattern thereafter. Oh, but you say, what about Picasso turning from realism to cubism to collage to surrealism to pottery – each roughly a decade. True, there are distinct ideas in each decade but the linear drawing and fragmentation of the image he settled on in his twenties are evident to the end of his life , as is his obsession with the female form. Whether you regard the work in the last decade of his life as ‘a mess’ as I have seen written or an evolution, is a matter of opinion. Whatever variations Scully and Mondrian introduced into the basic form of their work, the characteristics of their style and ideas were clearly visible early on.
Much has been written about Pollock having come to an end artistically a while before he died. Even he was set to abandon abstraction and return to the figure where he began, much to the dismay of a critic such as Greenberg. Other abstractionists simply went on painting the same painting forever even if they discovered a new medium. The figures Picasso was painting on his pottery at Vinteuil were the same ones he painted on canvas decades earlier even though the wife/mistress had changed. And this is not just true of painters. There has always been the supposed criticism by Igor Stravinsky that the composer Vivaldi did not write 400 concertos but the same concerto 400 times. Vivaldi had a formula for success and simply repeated it. But perhaps I’m being unfair and over generalising. Would, however, an extended life have made any difference?
That’s part of the point. Artists have a shelf life and to live beyond that shelf life either reveals the limitations or clogs up the line of succession. Young artists need either someone to emulate or someone to rebel against and it helps that they’re not around any more.
Perhaps there in another point worth mentioning. Whatever van Gogh was suffering from, his incarceration in Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy [since renamed the van Gogh] it was the peace and stability that the asylum gave him as well as daily contact with Doctor Gachet that allowed the paintings to evolve at all. He might well have committed suicide much earlier as his quest to minister to the poor in Belgium failed to prove fruitful. Who knows? Rothko, suffering from severe depression for most of his life, produced his best work in that time. An untimely suicide would have done nothing for his vast output and today, the suite of psychiatric drugs available might well have staved off his death for some time. Of course, the magnificent darkness of the chapel paintings might not have happened either as he careened along with a bright palette into another century. The proximity of impending death or facing lifelong debilitating disease – Proust spent much of his locked in a sealed room suffering from chronic asthma – had a profound effect on so many artists. Would Proust have found time away from parties and balls to write In Search of Lost Time, if he hadn’t been essentially bedridden. I’m not saying that old age or disease prompted the production of great writing or great art but that environmental factors certainly play a part. Premature death from disease may well be unfortunate but living beyond your time, given the enormous leaps in technology and planetary destruction we have seen in the last century, could be just as debilitating. Ask anyone, artist of otherwise, who grew up well before the internet how they have coped and many will tell you that they haven’t. The next hundred years will be no different.
And that’s another point. Artists responding to their times is an accepted fact. Those that filled canvases with images of human devastation after WW1 could not have repeated it after WW1. War changed. The Vietnam war generation were steeped in consumerism and mass advertising to say nothing of the effect of TV news reporting live from the battlefield. The major questions of racial and gender equality may well cease to be concerns in the near future [we can only hope] and the youthful energy it takes to tackle such themes artistically – and take artistic risks – diminishes with age. The rashness and devil-may-care invincibility of youth becomes more sanguine with age and those that aim for seeming perpetual youth in male pony tales, tattoos and clothing suited to a bygone era, would not only look out of place but feel it even worse. ‘Act your age’ is a common deprecatory insult but just how should a 116 year old Dali act today? You can only walk a gold painted lobster down Broadway or appear on chat shows telling the same stories, so many times. And as the Beatles discovered, the vivacity of youth created elegies to teenage problems of love or the lack of it. All of that faded quickly leaving Paul McCartney writing smaltzy ballads and John Lennon paeons to world peace. Would Lennon have benefitted from another century or song writing? Hard to tell. Initial fire is soon diluted and the sixties was over by the seventies when Punk, rap, synth pop and glam came to fore – none of which Lennon would have wanted to be part of.
Sadder still was the fate of Elvis and Tom Jones. The latter is still singing the same songs of decades ago on the stages on Las Vegas while elderly women queue up to throw their underwear in his direction. The last days of Elvis [fat, flat and sweating] were mostly an embarrassment. The plethora of Elvis imitators who gather annually in various corners of the world choose to remember the early songs and the white jump suit. The King died at just the right time to be inaugurated as a legend. Given another couple of decades and the world might not have been so kind.