What Did Monet, Goya & Matisse Have in Common? Their Late Work Was Among Their Best: LAT

Last edited Sun Feb 12, 2023, 03:33 PM - Edit history (1)

Books: 'What did Monet, Goya and Matisse have in common?' Los Angeles Times, Feb. 10, 2023. Ed. - Their late work was among their best.

(Photo: Claude Monet in his studio at Giverny 6 years before his death. (Henri Manuel / Bridgeman Images)

- Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph. By Richard Lacayo.

Plug the phrase “rising young art star” into Google and you will turn up a mountain of results. Rising young art stars are showing at museums, rising young art stars are moving merch at Art Basel, rising young art stars are sitting for studiously casual photos in fashion magazines. We live in a society that prizes youth, and the art world is no different. The conventional wisdom being that an artist’s most innovative years are in the first half of life.

Richard Lacayo might beg to differ. The former Time magazine art critic’s latest book, “Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph,” which was published last fall, tracks the works of artists who continued to push themselves — and the boundaries of art-making — right up to the end. And in some cases, the importance of this late-in-life work wouldn’t be understood until a generation or more had passed.

Take Claude Monet, one of the artists featured in the book — who lived to the ripe old age of 86 (he died in 1926) and continued to work until the very end of his life.

The French Impressionist’s late canvases came at a fraught time. He was fighting cataracts and racked with grief over the loss of his wife, Alice. Impressionism had slipped out of fashion, and a younger generation of brash upstarts, including Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, were making noise with Cubism and other fresh concepts. Monet had come to represent the institution, inspiring yawns in the avant-garde.

It might not have seemed so at the time, but Monet was still in possession of “a young man’s audacity,” writes Lacayo. And, “in his last decades it was wedded to an old man’s achieved mastery of his art, the fruit of Monet’s lifelong ‘researches’ into light, color, and the most potent ways to represent nature.”...https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-02-10/monet-goya-and-matisse-innovated-til-the-end-last-light-tracks-the-feats-of-artists-in-old-age