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| Rembrandt's last self-portrait | BIOS BOOKS IDEAS SYLLABUS FOLDABLE |
LINKS: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The picture above is a detail of Rembrandt's last self-portrait, painted in 1669, the year of his death. He was not exceptionally old at the time, only 63; by comparison, Titian lived to 91 and Michelangelo to 89. But the works of Rembrandt's last years show striking stylistic qualities that both unify them and set them apart: looser brushwork, a darker palette illuminated as though from within, a remarkable depth of spititual perception. With good reason, historians speak of Rembrandt's late style, a term that has acquired currency in many other periods and fields. See IDEAS above for a tentative list of some LateStyle fingerprints.
Throughout this course, I shall use the term LateStyle to refer to this phenomenon in whatever art it occurs. I shall also use the term Artist to refer to artistic creators in any field: not just visual artists, but writers and composers as well.
The works of art, music, and literature discussed in this course all come from the last years of their creator's lives, hence my title Sunset Harvest. But it will not be just any collection of last works; my primary focus is on those artists whose manner underwent a distinct shift in their later years. We shall also look at LateStyle work produced in the last months of a prematurely shortened life (eg. Mozart and Schubert), and work that shows LateStyle characteristics, though created well before the end of life (eg. T. S. Eliot and Gustav Mahler). And in case it all gets too gloomy, we will end with a few remarkable artists whose final periods granted them a sudden access of energy and joy (eg. Verdi, Matisse, and Mondrian).
The syllabus below is still a work in progress; the outline will remain, but I may make different selections as I think some more. However, I can say that each class will be anchored by a major work examined in some detail during the second hour of each class. As presently planned, these include: the operas Falstaff by Verdi and Death in Venice by Britten, the quasi-symphony The Song of the Earth by Mahler and the last chamber works by Beethoven and/or Schubert, and the literary masterpieces Time Regained by Marcel Proust and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, both studied via films. In the first hour of each class, I hope to combine shorter excerpts of all kinds together with painting and sculpture to devlop the emerging theme. But I am not going to attempt to anatomize genius or offer definitive solutions to the mystery of LateStyle. Think of this rather as a personally-curated harvest of work produced by remarkable artists blessed with a fruitful life.
The course will consist of six classes on Thursdays at 1:00 PM, starting April 7, and delivered on Zoom. As I develop each class, I'll change the RESOURCES link below its picture from grey to GOLD; clicking on it will take you to to webpage for that class. I encourage you to read the HANDOUTS in advance; on a double-sided printer, the FOLDED versions can be printed as booklets. I'll post class scripts, YouTube links, and other resources immediately after the end of each class. rb.
| April 7 | |
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| Beethoven and the String Quartet | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
In his last years, the stone-deaf Beethoven wrote music that he could hear only in his head, music that ignored formal expectations in search of a direct expression of struggle, anguish, and, at the end of his final string quartet, transcendence. We will consider the question of LateStyle in other art forms also, with a look at the late work of painters such as Goya and Turner, who struck off in directions entirely their own, and at the last poem by Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben."
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| Goya (detail) | Yeats | Turner |
| April 14 | |
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| Burt Lancaster in The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Some artists reach towards the unknown in later life; others retreat into an earlier age. Not necessarily in regression, but because it offers an irony that can show the present in a different light. We see this from Shakespeare in The Tempest, in Helen in Egypt by the modernist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and in Capriccio, the final opera of Richard Strauss. And Sicilian Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote a posthumously-published novel, The Leopard, that fictionalized the start of his own family's decline a century earlier.
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| The Tempest | HD (Hilda Doolittle) | Capriccio |
| April 21 | |
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| Britten and Death in Venice | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Death in Venice, the last opera by Benjamin Britten, may be a tragedy about aging and obsession, but it is nonetheless set in Venice, La Serenissima, and all is finally dissolved in the limpid Venetian light. Other artists have bathed themselves in light and color during their last years: Claude Monet in his garden at Giverny, Paul Bonnard in his wife's tiled bathroom, and poet Derek Walcott in the sun of the Caribbean.
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| Monet | Walcott | Bonnard |
| April 28 | |
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| Mahler and the Chinese landscape of The Song of the Earth | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
Suffering from a weak heart, Gustav Mahler knew that his days were numbered. So not risking the curse of a 9th Symphony that had ended the lives of Beethoven and Schubert, he called his next large work The Song of the Earth. All the same, it ends in a lovely lingering farewell. In the first hour we will look at other artists who have looked death in the face, whether because of their own illness, as with Franz Schubert and Emily Dickinson, or impending involvement in war, as with the German Expressionists Franz Marc and August Macke.
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| Marc | Dickinson (tinted) | Schubert |
| May 5 | |
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| Proust and Time Regained (film by Raul Ruiz) | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
The older people get, the easier it seems to be to dwell in the past. Time Regained, the last volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, was published posthumously. Poet C. P. Cavafy mined his own memories and those of his Alexandrian Greek culture. The later sculptures of Louise Bourgeois incorporate coded childhood memories, such as her series of giant spiders that she called Maman (Mother). And directors Federico Fellini and Kenneth Branagh used their own childhoods as the basis of movies made after they turned 60.
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| Branagh | Cavafy | Bourgeois |
| May 12 | |
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| Verdi and Falstaff | HANDOUT FOLDED RESOURCES |
After a lifetime of melodrama and tragedy, Giuseppe Verdi turned to comedy in his last opera, Falstaff, which he premiered at age 80. Though never a stranger to joy in his earlier work, Henri Matisse, confined to a wheelchair, rediscovered his youthful energy in colorful paper cutouts. And stern abstractionist (but jazz-lover) Piet Mondrian seemed to be entering new ground in his last works, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie. The rediscovery of joy seems less common in poets, but you see it, for example, in some of the last works of Seamus Heaney.
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| Matisse | Heaney | Mondrian (detail) |
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