The Artistic Late Show

There is a tendency for us to see the last work of artists, composers and writers as an intentional epilogue to their life’s achievement, to read into it some notion of creative apotheosis or at least, a kind of tidying-up of loose ends, of unresolved questions or even a settling of scores. Beethoven’s late quartets are often cited as examples of this kind of career consummation, as if the embrace of more ‘difficult’ polyphony signalled a final accomplishment, a spiritual and contemplative resolution of the restless symphonic argument of earlier years. But it’s seldom the case that the last works of great artists ascend the same kind of pinnacles climbed earlier. James Joyce’s last work, Finnegan’s Wake for instance, took difficulty to a new literary level, although few of us now relish its challenge. By contrast, his short story ‘The Dead’ from the collection Dubliners, published in 1914 when he was just 32, although not the magnum opus exemplified by his later work nevertheless provides us with a mesmerising examination of ending, where the snow, ‘falling faintly...faintly falling’ on the living and the dead hypnotically conveys an acquiescence to silent oblivion.

So it could be argued that it is death which arrives at the inconvenient or inopportune moment, failing to strike when it would best have ‘bookended’ the life-work. At the same time, while old age provides greater time and opportunity for artistic entropy, early death adds poignancy to late works. John Keats died from tuberculosis aged 25, and in his short life produced poetry of vivid and fervid intensity, but it was his premature demise that bestowed star quality on the life and immortality to the work; and what could be more affecting than his final request that his gravestone bear not his name or dates, but simply the inscription ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’? Fellow artists may also attempt to frame end of life in a particular way, and to make of it a fiction. Think of Henry Wallis’s painting Chatterton which romanticises the subject’s suicide elevating an impoverished and seemingly seedy existence (he was accused of forgery in his lifetime) into a tragic exaltation of a life undone.

Works left unfinished at death present us with another problem. Should we be content to view them literatim, or imagine them as they might have become? Post-modern criticism instructs us to disregard anything other than the work itself - the text, the artwork, the score – finished or unfinished, as irrelevant. Since Roland Barthes declared the ‘death of the author’, we have been encouraged to consider the notion of authorial intention as unduly reverential; the idea of a god-like artistic creator implies an egocentricity that distracts from the work – in other words, don’t get hung up on authorship, guess at intention, or at any significance for the creator’s biography. But death has a way of undercutting such theoretical polemic, and it is only human to want to speculate on what might have been. And there are many willing to take on the task of completion and furtherance. When P.D. James wrote Death Comes to Pemberley, it was part tribute to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,part straightforward murder mystery in frocks, and in part the satisfaction of a public appetite for more of the same. This is the same kind of demand that perpetuates the James Bond franchise beyond Ian Fleming’s own last word on his hero, with ‘continuation works’ provided by literary luminaries like Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd. Clearly, there is a financial imperative operating here that entails an artistic prolongation and momentum beyond the idea of epilogue. Yet a desire to sustain a good thing is forgivable, particularly if we can overcome the Romantic idea that the originator of a work has exclusive rights to it. When Pat Barker refocuses Homer’s Iliad (itself perhaps an unfinished or unresolved work) to see events from a woman’s viewpoint in The Silence of the Girls, she presents us with a classic story that is not so much a finalisation of what was incomplete as its re-appropriation, releasing it from the restrictive bonds of male narrative.

Of course, original creators themselves often recoil at the idea that artwork is ever truly finished. Imagine Monet near the end of his life adding a few more brushstrokes to his Vase of Flowers 40 years after he first began it, as if never quite satisfied by it. Picasso claimed it nonsense to ever consider a work finished: ‘to finish it means to kill it, to rid it of its soul.’ Among the final works of Velasquez was his masterpiece Las Meninasin which the artist shows us not just royal subjects and attendants, but the artist himself, staring at us from across the centuries. As Laura Cumming puts it ‘the figures of the past keep looking into our moment – as long as we keep looking back at them.’ Paradoxically then, the epilogue to an artistic life may not mark an ending, but its continuation, not a finish but a perpetuation. Ars longa, vita brevis.

(article published in Cherwell 2019)