[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]
I’m fascinated by artists whose creativity runs amok toward the end of their lives. Not just those who start when they’re old or work steadily until they die, but artists whose motivation seems to suddenly turn to pleasing nobody but themselves. It’s self-indulgence that can be baffling and even off-putting, but it’s also always interesting.
Beethoven was 55 and deaf when he composed his late string quartets, including Die Grosse Fuge (“the Great Fugue”), in 1825 and 1826. He died in 1827. The pieces were discordant and difficult to play. Audiences were bewildered. Critics called them “indecipherable uncorrected horrors” and “a confusion of Babel.” To modern ears they sound like Jazz a century before its time, and are now considered among his greatest masterpieces.
Charles Schulz was no Beethoven, but I think he had a comparable late Renaissance. His comic strip, “Peanuts,” began in 1950 and became a cultural juggernaut in the 1960s. “Peanuts” was good in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I think Schulz’s creativity reawakened in the ‘90s until his death in 2000, producing some of his most personal, thoughtful, and formally inventive work.
I’m also reminded of director Francis Ford Coppola’s recent movie “Megalopolis,” which he funded himself when no one else would. Critics’ reactions ranged widely, but all agreed they’d never seen anything like it.
I think you can get the clearest distillation of a master’s artistry when they have nothing left to prove and don’t much care what anybody else thinks. That’s the pure spirit.
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