A famous older artist showed us how aging can help and not hinder creativity.
The central theme of my book The End of Old Age: Living a Longer, More Purposeful Life is that the aging process helps us to grow and develop several key strengths, including wisdom, purpose and creativity. The following except from the book focuses on the persistence, growth and importance of creativity in late life, as seen through the seemingly failing life of an aging artist:
It was the winter of 1941, and a 71-year-old man was heading into a disastrous old age. Incessant bouts of severe abdominal pain forced a risky surgery that left him languishing in bed and delirious for months on end. He defied initial predictions of death, but was left wheelchair bound and unable to work in his usual manner. German troops overran his beloved France, tearing asunder the multicolored pieces of his world and sending them to destruction or exile. As the war years advanced, recurrent infections, pain and anorexia ravaged his body. He was bereft of family since his wife left him years before and his daughter was later arrested and tortured nearly to death by the Gestapo. Old age seemed a betrayal of everything he held sacred, leaving him physically disabled and decrepit, isolated and uncertain of his future. A review of his life in those years could easily lead one to cast being “old” as a curse, a dreaded decline, or a tragic gathering in and then a passing on.
Advance the clock now to the autumn of 2014, when the Paris fashion runways were bursting with color. Models adorned with vibrantly-hued material cutouts pieced into the latest designs of Christian Dior sashayed to thumping techno music and the cheers and calls of the audience. This brash and stylish couture left critics swooning, and was directly inspired, it must be noted, by one withered old man who had been lying half-dead in a hospital bed some 73 years earlier. Something remarkable had emerged from the fading old age of the man in question that continues to have profound influence on modern art, fashion, advertising and culture. It came from the aged life of an individual who had once been written off as half-dead, with his old age imagined as the beginning of the end. In the life of our protagonist, however, who I now reveal as the famed French artist Henri Matisse, we shall see how the maligned oldness ended and age became a dominant strength.
So how did Matisse do it? How did he return from delirium and near death and manage to revolutionize the art world? The nuns who nursed him back to health in the Spring of 1941 called Matisse “le résuscité”—the man who rose from the dead. His survival was unexpected and his recuperation was long and tortuous. He spent most of his time either bedbound or in a wheelchair and was unable to stand and stretch his body to paint on large canvases as before. The man who emerged, however, was clear-minded and determined to move forward: “It’s like being given a second life,” Matisse wrote to his son Pierre, “which unfortunately can’t be a long one.” As he lay in bed during those long months, Matisse might have been inspired by a profound memory from his youth. At the age of twenty, he was similarly confined to bed for many months as he recuperated from an intestinal ailment. Inspired by his roommate and enabled by a gift of brushes, paints and canvas from his mother, Matisse first began to paint, and it sparked a lifelong passion: “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hand, I knew this was my life,” Matisse wrote, describing himself “Like an animal that plunges headlong towards what it loves, I dived in” and discovered a “Paradise Found in which I was completely free, alone, at peace.”