ARTISTS
The Last Decade
The final years of an artist’s life can mark a profound culmination of vision, experience, and unrelenting creative force. The Last Decade explores this defining chapter in the careers of some of history’s most celebrated artists - Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Joan Mitchell, and others - who, in their twilight years, created some of their most daring and radical works, freed of expectations yet confronted with their legacy.
For Picasso, his final years were his most prolific: in his late eighties, he conjured a final alter ego - the Musketeer - a figure steeped in bravado and nostalgia who is depicted with fierce, frenzied energy. Warhol, too, spent his later years preoccupied with mortality, a fixation intensified by his near-fatal shooting in the 1960s. His life was cut short by sudden complications from surgery, leaving behind a body of late work that is both meditative and spectral. Others, like Cézanne, Miró and Mitchell, approached the end with an increasing freedom - brushwork growing looser, compositions more assured. Judd expressed this same freedom by expanding his materials, making use of Cor-ten steel, Douglas fir plywood, colored plexiglass, painted steel, and various forms of aluminum. Lichtenstein, for his part, ventured into new representational challenges, choosing Monet’s similarly late-in-life Impressionistic waterlillies and reworking in his own flat, heavily outlined, post-modern style.
In their final years, these artists worked with a heightened urgency and clarity, creating some of the most radical and significant works of their careers. While art history has often been fixated on youth as a catalyst of creative breakthrough, these late works demonstrate how decades of (life) experience shaped some of the most incisive and unrestrained expressions of an artist’s oeuvre.
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The final years of an artist’s life can mark a profound culmination of vision, experience, and unrelenting creative force. The Last Decade explores this defining chapter in the careers of some of history’s most celebrated artists - Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Joan Mitchell, and others - who, in their twilight years, created some of their most daring and radical works, freed of expectations yet confronted with their legacy.
For Picasso, his final years were his most prolific: in his late eighties, he conjured a final alter ego - the Musketeer - a figure steeped in bravado and nostalgia who is depicted with fierce, frenzied energy. Warhol, too, spent his later years preoccupied with mortality, a fixation intensified by his near-fatal shooting in the 1960s. His life was cut short by sudden complications from surgery, leaving behind a body of late work that is both meditative and spectral. Others, like Cézanne, Miró and Mitchell, approached the end with an increasing freedom - brushwork growing looser, compositions more assured. Judd expressed this same freedom by expanding his materials, making use of Cor-ten steel, Douglas fir plywood, colored plexiglass, painted steel, and various forms of aluminum. Lichtenstein, for his part, ventured into new representational challenges, choosing Monet’s similarly late-in-life Impressionistic waterlillies and reworking in his own flat, heavily outlined, post-modern style.
In their final years, these artists worked with a heightened urgency and clarity, creating some of the most radical and significant works of their careers. While art history has often been fixated on youth as a catalyst of creative breakthrough, these late works demonstrate how decades of (life) experience shaped some of the most incisive and unrestrained expressions of an artist’s oeuvre.
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