Creativity - Panderjam

CREATIVITY IN LATER LIFE

By Dr Murdo Macdonald

Unless you are an art historian (and perhaps even if you are one) you probably do not

realise quite how much of the art which we tend to describe as great was made by

people in later life.

Michelangelo made his greatest sculptures between the ages of seventy and ninety. Titian, perhaps the greatest of all the painters of the Italian Renaissance, painted his finest works when he was in his seventies and eighties. Matisse made some of his most outstanding and experimental colour works at the same age. Piet Mondrian changed the course of modern art twice, once at the age of fifty and again in his early seventies, made his greatest series of etchings when he was in his seventies.

The fact that one finds very high levels of creative achievement in artists in later life - even to the point of the last works being the best - shows that the idea that creativity is the preserve of the young is false.

Consider the response to the following question asked by a 50 year old: “What are my prospects of high creativity for the rest of my life?”.

On the basis of the classic and still widely respected study, Age and Achievement by Harvey Lehman (1953), the peak age for the production of great paintings (and indeed in other areas of endeavour) is the thirties.

But half of those artists) who lived to be over fifty created work included on Lehman’s list of “best” paintings when they were over fifty.

So in the light of my analysis the answer could be: “You are just as likely to create your best work during the rest of your life.” The figures are the same and both responses are correct, statistically speaking, but one aligns with a stereotype of decline in later life, the other undermines that stereotype.

What is revealing about late works - whether of Titian or Rembrandt - is an unusual degree of consideration of all aspects - technique, composition, subject matter. The final works seem to be extraordinarily near to the intention of the artist, and pervaded by an understanding, both intuitive and explicit. That is to say they are mature works in the most positive sense of that term. They seem to shed light on the meaning of that neglected word ‘wisdom’. [Click here to go to page 2]

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