The Brooklyn Rail

It’s not unusual for creative artists and scholars to extend their working time as far as humanly possible, attempting to complete projects when faced with a terminal disease or the prospect of cognitive decline. Rather than indulging in pleasurable pastimes that require little mental energy, they engage all the more intensively in applying their professional skills, refined over many years. Productivity increases, sometimes to the neglect of other responsibilities.

There are variations on this scenario. During the last few years of John Rewald’s life—he died in 1994—I had the impression that he was adding nuances to his catalogue raisonné of Paul Cézanne, as if completion of the project that had consumed so much of his working time over several decades would signal that his life, too, had reached its end—life and the catalogue adhering to the same temporal order. The germ of Rewald’s study dated back to his early scholarship, when, in 1937, he produced a painstaking review of the Cézanne catalogue published by his predecessor Lionello Venturi. Because some of the new entries that Rewald composed during the 1960s amounted to article-length essays, he may have been tempted to raise every entry to the same level of historical research and descriptive detail. By adherence to this standard, no end was in sight even in the 1990s. In contrast, I think of the case of Rudolf Arnheim—like Rewald, a prolific scholar—who continued to publish in academic journals until around age ninety-nine (he died in 2007 just short of turning 103). Arnheim had produced many books, but his late statements in journals were terse, some requiring less than a single page. I wondered at the time whether Arnheim was experiencing reduced powers of concentration, for which he compensated by radically condensing his scholarly contributions.

The case of Pablo Picasso presents greater complexity. Some years ago, I was struck by The Young Painter, Picasso’s work of April 1972, produced about ten weeks before the skull-like Self-portrait Facing Death of June 1972 that has come to define the artist’s final months. As depicted, the “young painter” stares out in wide-eyed wonder at, I imagine, the plethora of objects and views available to be represented. All is to be experienced, all is new and as fluid as Picasso’s cursory manner of rendering the image itself. The far more famous self-portrait is quite different; it conveys a searing material intensity and emotional gravitas that caused the artist’s chronicler Pierre Daix to comment that Picasso “was staring his own death in the face.”¹ Reacting similarly, Leo Steinberg called this image “a rare human icon of death in the first person.”² With which of the two pictorial images did Picasso identify? With the self-portrait, of course, but also, as I like to think, with the young painter. Picasso was one of many artists who entered old age youthfully.

When I was about thirty, a friend told me of a conversation she had with her father, then in his seventies. He had mentioned that, despite a degree of infirmity, he still felt the way he did when he was twenty. Without fully comprehending, I took this as information that might be of value in the future. Was the sense of enduring youthfulness an illusion? Not really, I’ve come to believe, for you can’t feel other than you do. The way you feel is your reality. I’ve discovered over the years that to feel at every age some younger age—whatever age it is—is the common human experience.

There are indications of such experience in Picasso. Not only did he create The Young Painter as the odd-man-out among his many images of lascivious men and women of advanced years, but he also regarded his own artistic potential as undiminished at every stage of life. He countered his well-documented fear of dying by experiencing undying desire—creative, aesthetic longing as much as sexual longing. At ninety, he said: “We don’t do it [have sex] any more, but the desire for it is still with us.”³ Desire doesn’t age. If not sexually active, Picasso remained engaged in doing art, just as at twenty, continuing to satisfy his creative urge. Up to a point.

Picasso transferred his notorious fear of dying to a fear of creative incapacity. (Leave any thought of Freudian sublimation aside; it demeans what artists do.) Picasso could extend his ageless life only by continuing to create within a boundless horizon, becoming the young painter repeatedly. Consider the parallel of dreaming, in which one’s persona, whether miraculously capable of flying or frozen in place immobilized, has no determinate age. Two statements from Picasso’s artist-friends—both of 1979, several years after he died—provide mirroring perspectives on his old-age situation. Brassaï reported: “He thought that if he stopped working, that was death. So, that’s why until his death he worked every day.” Édouard Pignon recalled: “Until his death, he had the desire to work. He used to say ‘I don’t go out any longer in the car because some imbecile will overtake me, he’ll run into me and I have still got a lot of paintings to do.”⁴

Like the writer of an unfinished catalogue, Picasso still had a lot to do. He believed that the entire history of painting remained in its evolutionary infancy. If you think you must be twenty because you feel twenty, then you have the time to do a lot, though you might advance the discipline no further than from infancy to early childhood. The sense of time at your disposal (to extend your art) may amount to an old-age fantasy, but it also constitutes reality as long as no outside force—an imbecile in a car—rudely awakens you from your creative dream. Mortality is the outside force affecting all. It’s the human condition that terminates desire, and invoking it is a banal consideration. Despite this limiting condition, the experience of working and creating returns an artist (or anyone) to the dreamy existence of a “young painter.” And ninety turns to twenty.

1. Pierre Daix, Picasso créateur (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 378.
2. Leo Steinberg, “Picasso’s Endgame,” October 74 (Fall 1995): 119.
3. Brassaï (Gyula Halász), “The Master at 90—Picasso’s Great Age Seems Only to Stir Up the Demons Within,” New York Times Magazine, 24 October 1971, 96.
4. Brassaï and Édouard Pignon, “Picasso on Death” (1979), in Marilyn McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 277.