The Brooklyn Rail

Is discrimination against the old rampant, in an ever more youth-besotted culture? Maybe not. As political and corporate worlds are keenly aware, the world’s population is rapidly—in some places dramatically—aging. The art world is paying attention, too. See, for instance, the proliferation of belated exhibitions celebrating senior artists, many of them long-neglected women, including Carmen Herrera, Etel Adnan, Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold.

Taking the bull by the horns, some artists have, over the years, opted for candid depictions of what aging looks like. Alice Neel, fearless as always, shed her clothes and stared gamely into the mirror without fear or favor—and without relinquishing her brushes, or her spectacles. Joan Semmel opts for soft colors and layered shadows in recent nude self-portraits, ruthless in her exposure of what gravity does to active older bodies. Rackstraw Downes, ever circumspect, nonetheless includes in his recent drawings, amid the furniture in his studio, the walker he uses to get around, a choice all the more moving for its dispassionate depiction. No one has presented a bolder image of old age than Louise Bourgeois, whose late, roughly life-size rag dolls, some copulating, bring desire, mortality and childhood harrowingly close.

Of course, scary representations of old women are nothing new. A spring 2023 exhibition at London’s National Gallery, The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, featured, as its titular painting, the portrait of An Old Woman (The Ugly Duchess) (ca. 1513) by Quentin Massys. This picture’s fame was greatly enhanced by John Tenniel, who drew upon it heavily for his rendering of the Duchess in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Tenniel’s illustrations animate the headlong transformations Carroll stages for Alice, who looms suddenly huge (as preteens do, to themselves) and then very small (ditto), while old folks like the Duchess simply shrink, rage and sputter. But Tenniel was kind compared to Massys, whose subject is rendered irredeemably grotesque: squinty eyed, pug-nosed, distinctly simian and suspiciously male, despite her lavish frippery. Indeed, “she is most likely a he,” according to the show’s curator Emma Capron; the subject’s wrinkled breasts, spilling out of a too-tight bodice, are, Capron says, “a Massys fantasy.” Capron further explains that like Leonardo da Vinci, whose sketches of related characters are believed to have inspired Massys, he “was very interested in carnivals, where men would impersonate women.”¹ In wide-angled Renaissance satire, it seems, the female, the queer and the old were all demonized together.

Some of the era’s views on age were more compassionate. The National Gallery exhibition included a limewood sculpture of a naked aged woman, seated humbly and observed without pity. Withered, in fact nearly skeletal, she is neither sacred nor profane, simply mortal. On the other hand, there was also Albrecht Dürer’s scabrous engraving, Witch Riding Backward on a Goat, of ca. 1500. With a broomstick thrust between her naked legs and one of the goat’s horns held between her buttocks, she is wild-haired, hook-nosed, masturbatory, and seemingly possessed of terrifying dark magic. In other words, surely Jewish in the visual language of the time, and still legible as such in our own age, enduringly haunted not just by witches but also by apparently inextinguishable antisemitism.

Doug Dreishpoon encouraged me to read Simone de Beauvoir’s fascinating The Coming of Age, an encyclopedic account of how different cultures and nations have treated their elders. In this grim epic, those who honor the wisdom of the aged are rare. One such, famously, is China, whose warm welcome this past summer to the centenarian Henry Kissinger, as an ambassador of peace (of all things), is a slightly comic expression of this kind of respect. Another book recommended to me not long ago is Ryszard Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus, a travelogue which retains an unsettling timeliness. It cross-references the author’s travels as a Polish journalist across Asia and Africa with those of his Greek predecessor, as each encounters an unending series of pointless bloodbaths. Departing briefly from wars of conquest, Kapuściński muses on a scourge he calls “temporal provincialism”—an inclination to forego knowledge of distant times and places. Open-minded and alert observers—artists, for instance, as well as journalists—can perform the invaluable service of leading us inside other ages, both historical and individual.

They do so not just by refreshing cultural memory, but also by showing us what old age looks like. When I mentioned I was addressing this question, another friend suggested I consider John Coplans’s late photographs, in which, a little scandalously at the time (the mid 1980s), he shone a light on his own aging body, honing in on hands, knees, back, and torso. I was surprised to discover, returning to them recently, that he was then in his mid-sixties, which now seems to me, ahem, middle-aged. Coplans’s fingers are slightly swollen in these candid photos, a bit gnarled, and his torso sags a little, but he is still hirsute: the hair on his chest is black. Moving the timeline forward, Marilyn Minter’s book Elder Sex, which developed from an article about sex after the age of seventy, published in the New York Times Magazine in January 2022, contains, Minter says, “all the pictures that the Times couldn’t publish. For instance, they couldn’t show any vibrators. America is a puritan country, remember? We have all these uptight evangelicals here.”² So we do, and also some very vigorously agitating oldsters, who will not cede pleasure without a good fight. (Though I wonder: How many before us have pledged the same?)

Along with considering how artists experience age, and express it in their work, there is the question of how those of us who write about art do the same. For my part, I can say with mixed feelings that I no longer feel visual culture is a roaring engine of invention I’ll never gain on. But there is nothing secure about my sense that I have some purchase on how to think about art. Like memories, which change every time we extract them, understanding never stands still. New light brings new wrinkles along with clarity; exposure brightens things, and fades them. “The classical empiricists pictured the newly born mind as a tabula rasa,” Stanley Cavell wrote in his memoir; he recommends instead seeing “the mind as perpetually yet incompletely being erased or as shedding or shunning impressions.”³ For all of us, the stream of consciousness wanders, widens and narrows, hurries and slows. We see ourselves as always deep inside it, braced at the emotionally weighted middle of our conjectured span. It’s clear, though, that the midpoint keeps moving, an instability which makes a blessing of what once felt like a trial.

1. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/mar/11/
2. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/mar/11/
3. Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010), 19