Expired at 35? Art’s Obsession with Youth

ewa_partum-zmiana-fot-fundacja-profile.jpg, default, Ewa Partum, ‘Change: My Problem Is a Woman’s Problem’, photo: Museum of Art in Łódź, Expired at 35? Art’s Obsession with Youth

#photography & visual arts

At 35, an artist can find the door to the art world suddenly shutting in their face. But has it always been this way? And what does that say about the art world’s obsession with youth, and the ways artists have confronted aging across different eras?

The ‘invention’ of youth

In 1975, the art historian and philosopher Mieczysław Wallis released his book Późna Twórczość Wielkich Artystów (Late Works of Great Artists). His preoccupation with late works of Rembrandts and Frans Hals, but also Goethe and Leopold Staff easily links to the author’s own biography – the book appeared on bookstore shelves merely a few months before he died at the age of 81.

While the fascination with youthful genius seems hardwired into our culture, Wallis shows that it’s relatively easy to find examples of artists who, after a few decades of activity, boasted a mastery of technique, creative freedom and self-confidence that resulted in the most brilliant works in their careers. While Michelangelo was 20-something when he sculpted the Vatican Pieta, he oversaw the renovation of Saint Peter’s basilica at the very last stage of his life, slowly approaching the age of 90 and remaining not only Rome’s most respected artist, but also one who set the direction for contemporaneous art, co-creating late Renaissance and propping the door ajar for the Baroque.

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Roman Kochanowski, ‘Old Age’, c. 1900, private collection, reproduction: pinakoteka.zascianek.pl

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The fascination with talented youth and the respect for experienced elders are two poles the consecutive artistic periods have moved between over the centuries. Neither of them has ever disappeared completely, although what has been changing its place is the centre of gravity which, starting from Romanticism through the fin de siècle to modernism has been moving closer and closer towards the fascination with the young age. Wallis’ book remains one of the exceptions that resists its constant rule.

Another such exception, this time of a different type, was the exhibition titled Historie o Starości (Stories of Old Age), prepared in 2019 in Galeria Arsenał in Białystok by Magdalena Godlewska-Siwerska. Going a step further than Wallis, the curator presented not only works created by mature contemporary artists, but also those which touch upon particular aspects of aging – from physical through psychological to economic – from the perspective of younger creators.

Tender observer

Thumbnail — Wojciech Gerson, ‘Granny's Coming!’, 1897, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

Respect for the elderly and their life experience on one hand, the fear of losing one’s physical abilities, illness and death – for centuries, the artistic image of old age reflected such a twofold approach to the problem of aging itself. For each learned patriarch and solemn self-portrait of old age there was an image of the lewd old man from the biblical motif of Susanna and old men, as well as a caricaturally contorted depiction of an old lady resembling Death in the allegorical representations of the stages of a woman’s life.

These conventions evolved in the 19th century. Created at the turn of the century. Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz’s Starzec z Książką (Old Man with a Book) was an obvious successor of the modern Saint Jeromes. However, the second half of the 19th century put a human face on the old conventions, introducing a more emotional tone. For instance, scenes contrasting old age with youth started to assume many different faces. Wojciech Gerson’s Babcia Idzie (Granny's Coming!), a sentimental piece dressed in a period costume, depicts intergenerational tenderness through the image of a granddaughter leading her grandma who embraces her, supporting herself with a cane yet proudly keeping herself upright – a matron full of power and dignity.

The reflection on the passage of time, as painted by Teodor Axentowicz, has the rural shape of Starzec i Dziewczyna (Old Man and a Girl) – a motif constantly recurring in the artist’s late works. The foggy pastel pieces are full of blurred shapes, instead of wizened faces we see almost ethereal visages surrounded by fluffy halos of white hair. And although the contrast between age and youth remains visible due to their physiognomy, in all the works both figures seem to be united on a psychological level. The young girls remain static and absent-minded, as melancholic as their several decades older companions – as if the painter responded to the stereotype of a doddering old man with a depiction of ‘old souls’ in teenage bodies.

One of the most extraordinary, lyrical and down-to-earth representations of old age is a piece by Roman Kochanowski, one of the lesser-known late 19th- and early 20th-century painters, one of the Polish ‘Munich group’, an expert on landscapes. And it’s the landscape that dominates his 1900 piece Starość (Old Age) – a clearing on the edge of a forest, bathed in warm, early autumn afternoon sun. Into this conventional landscape motif, tinted with delicate symbolism of the autumn scenery, a genre scene sneaks – a small form of a hunched-up woman supporting herself with a cane. This tiny black figure introduces a certain weight into this simple, almost banal landscape; she seems to both blend into it and grapple with it.

The gender of old age

A key change to the artistic depictions of old age happened in the second half of the 20th century, the times of the growing importance of feminist perspective and performance art, in which the body is not just represented but physically present. ‘The male artist has got no biography. The female artist – unlike the male artist – has got a biography. It’s important if the female artist is young or old’, proclaimed the words on the floor of Art Forum Gallery in Łódź, where in 1979 Ewa Partum staged her performance Zmiana: Mój Problem jest Problemem Kobiety (Change: My Problem Is A Woman’s Problem).

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Katarzyna Kozyra, ‘Men’s Bathhouse’, 1999, five-channel video installation (colour), loop, 4:3 PAL, variable duration, sound, exhibition view, photo: Ela Białkowska

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Katarzyna Kozyra, "Łaźnia męska", 1999, pięciokanałowa instalacja wideo (kolor), loop, 4:3 PAL, czas: różny, dźwięk, widok ekspozycji, fot. Ela Białkowska

The elaborate make-up on half of the artist’s body had an aim opposite to the usual – instead of concealing the signs of aging and rejuvenating Partum, it made her look older. The surrealist effect of the half-transformed body resembled a ‘before and after’ photograph come to life or two representations as if taken out of 'stages of a woman’s life' merged together. Does the artist’s age and appearance influence the reception of her work? Find the answer yourselves, suggests the artist, simultaneously presenting to the viewers her young body and its aged version.

Almost two decades later, in 1997, Katarzyna Kozyra directed Łaźnia (Bath). Unlike Partum’s performance, the scenes filmed in a women’s bath in Budapest remain completely unstaged – it’s just daily reality recorded with a hidden camera, turned by Kozyra into a multi-channel film installation including two references to art history. One of them is Ingres’ orientalist-classicist fantasy The Turkish Bath, the other – one of the representations of Susanna and old men, authored by Rembrandt. Unlike the bodies in both paintings, the women filmed in the Hungarian bath are perfectly normal-looking, with different bodily proportions, levels of physical fitness and of different ages.

Dorota Jarecka wrote that Kozyra shows 'what’s usually not shown, what everyone knows about, yet they suppress or shelve that knowledge. It’s the knowledge of the inevitable end and what comes before, and what our civilisation of youth and health considers almost indecent – the old age'. Kozyra goes even further, showing not only commonplace, aging bodies in the place of statue-like, manneristically contorted bodies of odalisques, but presenting a reproduction of Susanna and Old Men, she places the audience themselves in the roles of those caricatural, lewd, old voyeurs.

Ritual & inertia

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Katarzyna Kozyra, ‘The Rite of Spring’, 1999–2002, video still, photo: Zachęta National Gallery of Art

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Katarzyna Kozyra, "Święto wiosny", 1999-2002, kadr wideo, fot. Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki

After two versions of Łaźnia (Bath), a female one and a male, the aging body reappears in Kozyra’s Święto Wiosny (The Rite of Spring). Reaching for the titular ballet by Igor Strawiński, Kozyra reconstructs Wacław Niżyński’s experimental choreography, compulsive and ferociously difficult even for the most physically capable young dancers. However, in these roles she cast nude bodies of elderly people, photographed in hundreds of shots, lying down, naked, on a neutral white background, then used as film frames and animated. Here, virtuosity is contrasted with inertia, on one hand strongly departing from the rigour of the original choreography, on the other – reinforcing the effect of a compulsive ritual aimed at by Niżyński.

Another work possessing an aspect of mystery is one of Zbigniew Libera’s early pieces, Obrzędy Intymne (Intimate Rituals) from 1984.

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In 1984 I was nursing my bed-bound grandmother who needed to be taken care of, fed, and washed. I was shocked by what I was doing. They seemed to be strange, intimate rituals. I was astonished by the fact that I, a 20-something-year-old man was wiping the bottom of his own grandmother and it looked as if she was his child. I decided to film all that using a camera on a tripod. […] Filming was a sort of catharsis, a way of telling myself that the body isn’t evil, old age isn’t evil, death isn’t evil.

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Zbigniew Libera, ‘Intimate Rituals’, 1984, photo courtesy of Raster Gallery

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Zbigniew Libera, "Obrzędy intymne", 1984, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Galerii Raster

Similarly to Kozyra’s Łaźnia, Obrzędy Intymne allows us, through the lens of a static camera, to observe a situation that’s commonplace and intimate at the same time, this time, however, including a main character deeply immersed in dementia and relying solely on the help of her loved ones. On one hand, Libera’s film is a realistic, far from sugarcoated representation of care, tenderness, familial love expressed through a series of rituals around the ailing, close to death grandmother – from arduous feeding to washing and changing diapers. At the same time, the film, completely devoid of sound, takes on a mystery-like character emphasised by the title.

In Libera’s work, sacrifice and nurture is accompanied by taking control of the body of the character, Regina G., who’s at this point unable to consent to being filmed or to refuse to consent. And one may suspect that refusal would be the most likely scenario, considering the repression of the image of an ailing, aging body from public space. To describe his piece, initially presented only privately, within a circle of creators of Łódź alternative scene of the 1980s, and only shown to a wider public two years later, Libera used the term ‘the art of embarrassment’, coined by Marek Janiak. Filming his sickly grandmother and showing the image publicly became the artist’s attempt to question his own sense of embarrassment evoked by the contact with an old body requiring care.

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Jan Świdziński, ‘Old Age Is No Joy’, 2003, photo: Arsenał Gallery in Białystok

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It’s quite telling that the most expressive, sometimes almost shocking images are those belonging to or foreshadowing critical art of the 1990s, authored by then very young artists, confronting themselves with the fear of aging and illness. When done by artists with 7 or 8 decades behind them themselves, reflection on aging takes on a much more serene, slightly ironic and melancholic form.

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Koji Kamoji – Cisza i wola życia

On his exhibition Starość Nie Radość (Old Age Is No Joy) in XX1 gallery in 2005, Jan Świdziński presented – among other things – a video in which he stands in front of the camera and throws up his hands time after time, repeating the titular phrase. The 2018 version of Koji Kamoji’s installation Cisza i Wola Życia (Silence and the Will to Live) – composed of aluminium tiles resembling a sheet of water broken up here and there by paving stones – lacks tiny boats, which were replaced by an old wheelchair placed in the corner, in a non-figurative, though equally suggestive way tying one’s experience of landscape with the awareness of the aging body, something that Roman Kochanowski already accomplished in his painting over a century ago.

_{Originally written in Polish, May 2021, translated by Anna Potoczny, Dec 2021}

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