When We Are Very Old: Artists, the Feminine, the Masculine and Age

In this final session we will consider how artists visualized their own bodies as aging, both as lived experience and in depictions. Since modern art was a movement associated with youthful rebellion, and as the female body was one of the most commonly depicted motifs, aging represents a special challenge for women as both subjects making art and women whose bodies were objectified in art. Likewise, in contemporary discourse the virtuosity of male artists was often equated with virility. Loss of musculature, vision, and impotence challenged the essence of self. In this session, we will consider the aging body as present and absent, distorted or realistically depicted, in the work of several artists who were active between 1889 and 1980.

Edmund Munch, Old Man in Warnemunde, 1907.

Hags, Witches, Crones and Tyrants; Feeble Old Men and Desperate Old Women

Depictions of aging in western art divide for the most part on a binary: old women are grotesques, hags and witches. Old men are feeble and the lowest order of society. Despite the sensitivity with which they may have depicted parents or revered figures in society, the types that are represented reflect antagonism toward previous generations and signify alienation as a characteristic of modern life. Old women might on the one hand represent the victimized in society, on the other hand they stand in for psychological tension and terror.

Pablo Picasso, Celestina, 1903

Why is there so little about aging in modern art?

In the first class we will look at images of aging by artists associated with the avant-garde and modernism after 1850 and up to World War II. We will discuss ways in which images of old men and old women related to artistic goals, cultural contexts, the gender of the artists and subject, and attitudes toward time, medicine, death and dying. You will be invited in this first session to consider reasons why in western art modernists depicted aging in problematic ways. 

1889-1945: Cultural Differences to Aging, Death and Dying

The global economy, imperialism, and a rise in tourism exposed modernists to art and artifacts from cultures with very different attitudes toward aging, death and dying. In this session we will look at how gender and aging relate to primitivism as a tendency in modernism. How was aging represented in these cultures and how does that representation relate to the ways in which modernists depicted elderly men and women?