In 1982, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork staged the first-ever main retrospective devoted to the work of Louise Bourgeois. She was 70 years outdated. The overdue exhibition was supposed to solidify Bourgeois’s legacy, to acknowledge greater than half a century of inventive output. However Bourgeois would stay one other 28 years, and would make artwork till the day she died. What’s extra, the items from the ultimate stretch of her life had been amongst her finest and most modern.
“No one could have guessed,” writes Susan Gubar in her achieved new e-book Grand Finales: The Artistic Longevity of Girls Artists, “that another retrospective would be needed in 2017—to account for the aesthetic breakthroughs of old age.”
Bourgeois was removed from the one artist who continued to evolve proper up till the top of her life. Gubar, a feminist scholar and literary critic, argues that ladies artists have traditionally discovered super freedom in outdated age, liberated eventually from home obligations, sexual objectification, and the dominion of males. Grand Finales profiles 9 such ladies — together with two visible artists, Bourgeois and Georgia O’Keeffe — to determine a lineage of creatives who reinvented themselves of their last years.
Cowl picture of Susan Gubar’s Grand Finales: The Artistic Longevity of Girls Artists, 2025, W.W. Norton & Firm (picture courtesy W.W. Norton & Firm)
The e-book is ostensibly powered by Gubar’s scholarly curiosity in regards to the interrelation of creativity and outdated age. However her analysis can also be rooted in a deeply private want for position fashions who may train her the best way to age “with mojo, with panache, with bravura performances of geezer machismo,” to repeat the creator’s irresistible phrase. Her chosen artists actually have classes to impart, however she properly eschews hagiography in her profiles. O’Keeffe, for one, proves a prickly character, although her apparent flaws don’t detract from her outstanding final act, when she traded New York for New Mexico, escaping the shadow of her well-known philandering husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and producing her most iconic work.
No two ladies’s arcs are alike, via Gubar teams her topics by widespread theme: the “lovers” (O’Keeffe and the writers George Eliot and Colette) who drew newfound power from relationships with youthful males; the “mavericks” (Bourgeois, the author Isak Dinesen, and the poet Marianne Moore) who leveraged their quirky sensibilities to undermine stereotypes about outdated ladies; and the “sages” (jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham) who had been invigorated late in life by a dedication to social justice. Alongside the best way, she invokes scores of different ladies artists who remade outdated age in their very own picture.
Susan Gubar (© Julie Grey)
Gubar, herself 80 years outdated, doesn’t romanticize the expertise of growing old: she is aware of firsthand that with it comes a parade of losses, from our power and mobility to our family members. However she takes coronary heart within the dynamism and flexibility of her topics, a lot of whom produced their most formidable and unique artwork as they approached the top of their lives. The e-book’s in-depth analyses of a few of these works can slip right into a moderately tutorial register, and could appear dauntingly dense to readers looking for easy inspiration, however for the lit crit lovers amongst us, they show splendidly enlightening.
Amongst Gubar’s most attention-grabbing findings is how the constraints of getting older can current alternatives to discover new creative modes. Bourgeois’s late-life sculptures, for instance, “grew humungous until, toward the very end of her life, they shrank into small proportions that could be handled at a table in a wheelchair.” In the meantime, the elder O’Keeffe “often found watercolor, pastel, and graphite easier to use than oils” after dropping her central imaginative and prescient at 84.
Grand Finales is a rigorous, intellectually rousing portrait of the artist as an outdated girl, although some biographical sketches show extra compelling than others. Creativity, Gubar concludes, is a muscle that one both makes use of or loses, and using it presents huge advantages as we age. Creative tasks helped give all of the e-book’s topics goal and solace as they navigated impairment and grief. These artists refused to consign themselves to what the creator calls “Little-Old-Lady-Land,” and as an alternative opted to maintain looking, pushing, and making an attempt new issues. Above all, Gubar writes, they shared “an in-your-face audacity that bespeaks a drive to keep on realizing one’s own potential.”
Grand Finales: The Artistic Longevity of Girls Artists by Susan Gubar (2025) is revealed by W. W. Norton & Firm and is obtainable on-line and in bookstores.
