History in Five: In 2013, you gave a lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on artists in old age. What inspired you to expand on the subject and write a book?

Richard Lacayo: It was the realization that I had only scratched the surface of the subject. In particular, I was fascinated by the varying ways that different artists had navigated old age. There was no one-size-fits-all approach to their late life and art, though they all subscribed to one imperative – you must work and go on working.

Hin5: The book focuses on Titian, Francisco Goya, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edward Hopper, and Louise Nevelson. What sets these artists apart from others who also continued to work into their last decades?

RL: They were all open to change, to further exploration. Not all artists who persevere into old age manage to produce some of the greatest work of their lives – and better still,  sometimes make work of a very new kind, like the paper cut outs of Matisse, or the loose, expressive brushwork of Titian’s late style, so different from the more tightly controlled surface of his earlier work. Even Hopper, a devoted realist to the end, in a few of his last pictures toyed with something verging upon the surreal.

Hin5: While creating their revolutionary works, these artists had to contend with the effects of aging. How did they navigate their physical declines to produce their art?

RL: They simply kept at it, as best they could. In Monet’s seventies and eighties, the very years he was producing his magnificent final water lily panoramas, cataracts caused him terrible problems with his eyesight.  But in his determination to complete this immense project he kept subjecting himself to workarounds – eyedrops, surgeries, tinted lenses – complaining bitterly all the while but getting the job done.  Matisse underwent two surgeries in his early seventies that left him a semi-invalid, but he never let his misfortunes darken the mood of his art. He even turned that situation to his advantage, inventing the joyful paper cut outs that he could produce from his bed or his wheelchair. That was just Matisse being Matisse – by no means always a happy man, but one almost always committed to a joyous art. As for Nevelson, when she finally became truly famous on the threshold of sixty, she was still in pretty good health, and she stayed that way for most of her very long and productive life. 

Hin5: Some of the artists you write about, like Titian and Goya, captured a darkness in their later works, while others, like Matisse, expressed youthfulness. What stood out to you when examining the evolution of each artists’ work into old age?

RL: Again, that there is no one way they all managed their last years.  In Goya’s case, the plain darkness of his later work, like The Disasters of War and what we now call “The Black Paintings”, emerges out of the twin calamities of his later years, Spain’s brutal Peninsular War against France and then the return to power of the vengeful and reactionary Spanish King Ferdinand. Yet Hopper worked through the Great Depression and World War II without acknowledging either one in his art. Likewise Matisse. Meanwhile, after Goya escaped Spain at last for a largely contented exile in France his imagery lightened up again.  

Hin5: What would you like readers to take away from Last Light, particularly those who think their best years may be behind them?

RL: In his eighties Hopper was asked by an interviewer what advice he would give to a young painter. He had a one word answer: “Work”. It was the word all six of these artists lived by. Very few of us are artists or ever will be, but if you loved whatever work you used to do, their example says find something like it and go on doing it. And if you hated it? Find something you do love and do that. It doesn’t even have to feel like work. Art after all is work that can – sometimes – feel like play. Your next “work” could be fishing. It could be caring for your family.  It could be caring for others.  It just needs to be gratifying and you need to keep on doing it.