‘Without Being Rude...’: The Art of Ageing and Ageing in Art
Clare Shenstone’s 2024 show at Gillian Jason Gallery, ‘Looking Backwards, Moving Forwards’
The idealistic art student, the starving painter in the garret, the icon that died too young: these are romantic stereotypes that sell headlines.
But these popular tropes leave no space for artists as they age. Can one retire from being a painter or a sculptor? When does a career in art end? What of legacy and fame? And what happens if time tampers with the body needed to combine manual labour and deep, critical reflection?
Beneath the art world’s perceived glitz, there are difficult realities that need to be confronted. ‘If you’re an ageing artist, are you still painting? Do you have the support of a studio to carry on?’ asks Millie Jason Foster, director of Gillian Jason Gallery, which opened in 1980 and was the UK’s first space focused solely on female artists. ‘If it’s just you, it’s a whole different story.’
Millie Jason Foster, director of Gillian Jason Gallery, the first UK gallery dedicated to showing solely female artists
Championing artists’ estates as they enter their twilight years is a core part of the gallery’s mission today – especially if the work in question has been unfairly overlooked by critics. For women, who are more likely to take career breaks (in part due to motherhood), such dismissal by the market is unfortunately common.
Jason Foster cites Clare Shenstone as an example. A multimedia artist and close friend of Francis Bacon, Shenstone is, ‘an extraordinary painter, very prolific. She’s created 30,000 pieces of art over 50 years,’ she says. ‘But what hasn’t been consistent is her marketing. We’re left with this extraordinary archive of completely unseen artworks.’
In her heyday – the markedly more misogynistic 1980s – Shenstone was passed over in favour of her male contemporaries. Now, Gillian Jason Gallery is working to restore her rightful place in art history, especially as Shenstone is no longer able to work at full capacity. In 2024, they curated a retrospective of Shenstone’s works which reintroduced collectors to her oeuvre. ‘We have to consider, can the legacy of your career sustain you in your old age?’ asks Jason Foster.
Maro Gorky in her Tuscany studio (image credit: Stefan Giftthaler)
Such physical ramifications of aging are the elephant in the room. Maro Gorky, the daughter of abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky and a career artist herself, notes a dip in productivity: ‘When you reach the age of 82 your life consists of just getting through the day. I’m doing perhaps two hours of painting; everything takes three times as long.’ Her husband, celebrated author and sculptor Matthew Spender, has experienced a similar slowing down. Known for large-scale works, carving in stone has become increasingly demanding. ‘People have to fight against the collapsing body,’ Gorky says.
But putting down the paintbrush never crosses her mind. Her current project involves re-working oil paintings she’d created twenty years ago that have since cracked. Some of these canvases measure over two square meters. ‘Somebody once said you should never paint a canvas that you can’t lift yourself,’ Gorky laughs, ‘Maybe that’s true.’
Hanneke Beaumont in her studio, Middelburg (image credit: Mijntje Lukoff)
Dutch sculptor Hanneke Beaumont, who had her first solo show in 1983, has worked across terracotta, bronze and cast iron throughout her illustrious career, which includes important public commissions such as the six-metre-tall statue Stepping Forward, installed in front of the European Union Council.
‘Without being rude, I don’t think about any of the things you’re asking me’, she says cheerfully. ‘I don’t think about getting old.’ However, Beaumont shares that her husband has a heart condition, so she’s spending more time at home. ‘I’m in great health – sometimes it’s the people around you that have difficulties.’
Still, the studio’s siren call eventually asserts itself. ‘Making art is so much a part of me that if I don’t create, I’m restless.’ She describes being drawn to clay, working intuitively, almost unthinkingly. ‘Even as a child I always wanted to make things with my hands,’ she says. ‘I don’t see what else I would be doing.’
The desire to make is never extinguished.
For Maro Gorky, the same unwavering impetus to create was a habit ingrained since childhood. ‘I wasn’t supposed to go to school,’ she shares, ‘everybody was supposed to be an artist, it was our norm.’ As much as there are dynasties centred around law and politics, her family’s revolved around the arts.
Connecticut Wedding, by Maro Gorky (1991)
Although everybody needs to earn a living, speaking to both Gorky and Beaumont it becomes clear that anything connected to the market or legacy take a backseat.
Beaumont expresses delight that she doesn’t have to deal with buyers or fairs. Nor is she overly attached to her work. ‘There’s so many sculptures, piles of them, stored in museums, all by good artists—and they’re not even on show,’ she says.
Meanwhile, Gorky, who moved to rural Italy with her husband in the late 1960s, is equally blasé about the lofty ephemera of reputation and riches. ‘If we’d moved to New York, our careers would be much more sparkly. But Matthew and I, because we have very famous fathers, we’ve seen the folly of it all,’ she says (her husband is the son of the writer Stephen Spender, former US Poet Laureate). ‘We’re not prepared to be hurt in order to achieve fame and glory.’
If anything, life experience has given Gorky a sense of optimism. She notes her daughters’ anxieties around climate change; they often tell her she’s lucky for having lived in a better time, but she thinks it’s a matter of perception. The memory of a post-WWII world, nuclear scares, and the Vietnam War felt equally world-ending at the time.
It’s harder for artists to feel purposeless.
There are some curious conversations happening culture-wide around aging. Last year’s body-horror box office hit, The Substance, was a forensic examination of how women are discarded by society as they mature. This January, Netflix released Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever, a documentary following Bryan Johnson, the tech-millionaire whose mission in life is achieving immortality. These recent examples serve to highlight the extreme fever pitch our fear of aging has reached. It is a symptom of our modern association of youth with productivity, and therefore age with obsolescence.
But the vocation of an artist defies this categorisation. They balance thinking and doing in equal measure, and this bleeds beyond the routines and financial incentives of conventional jobs, taking on the qualities of a near-spiritual calling. It’s harder for artists to feel purposeless.
Besides, an artist’s conceptual thinking can crystallise the wisdom of experience into exciting forms. Take Richard Wentworth, who worked with Henry Moore, ran the department of Sculpture at The Royal College of Art, and was awarded a CBE for services to art. Today, he’s considered a leading figure of the New British Sculpture movement that developed in the late 1970s (although he tells us that ‘status’ doesn’t matter, ‘standing is what counts’).
Known for a mischievous treatment of everyday objects - his works playfully modify the quotidian, from tilting desks to wavy ladders to sweet wrappers used as bookmarks - Wentworth has a refreshing way of looking at the world, ‘I think it’s good fun when you’re old. I’m probably the same person, just more knowing.’
(L) 35°9,32°18, by Richard Wentworth, 1985, (R) Tract (from Boost to Wham), 1993
Wentworth turned 77 last year, and in our conversation, he acknowledges that age takes a toll on the body (‘not a good idea to fall downstairs’, he says with a twinkle). Yet he’s full of beans, bouncing around his studio, picking up items and flinging them back down, chatting about carpentry, still-life, and Henry Kissinger. He emails after our interview to add, ‘the really memorable things in our lives are “seen” out of the corner of our eye’. Fragments of existence accrue over a lifetime, and Wentworth enjoys pondering them.
This constant alertness is key to his mode of being. ‘I’ve got irritable brain syndrome, which I think is quite common near creative activity,’ Wentworth says. ‘Maybe I’ve replaced not being very gifted with being extremely nosy and curious.’
If there is any pattern, it’s thinking outside the box.
Richard Wentworth, pictured in Thilo Hoffmann’s Artist Portraits series
Studies show that as we age, thoughts tend to follow patterns due to ingrained neural pathways, but Wentworth’s constant questioning seems to protect him from falling into this trap. If there is any pattern, it’s thinking outside the box. ‘I’m aware of what we might call an architectonic intelligence,’ he says, noting that he’s perpetually alert to how objects, like tables and glasses of water, interact. This fascination with commonplace items offers a powerful driving force – inspiration is available everywhere.
Here’s an example of his process: Wentworth recalls an artwork he created in the 1980s, composed of light bulbs hung in a net.
‘What is a lightbulb?’ he asks, excitedly. ‘In childhood it’s wonder, failing to go to sleep, the on-off switch, sudden magic! You’re under the bedclothes... it’s all sorts of things!’
In these seemingly trivial moments, he explores what he calls ‘deep energies’, where imagination lies. He digs into the material world with childlike vigour – and is thrilled to see through the eyes of actual children too. Wentworth shares a word invented by his four-year-old granddaughter, ‘coincity’, a portmanteau of the words, ‘coincidence’ and ‘serendipity’. ‘I think I have pretty high levels of coincity,’ Wentworth chuckles, ‘I’m trying to get it into the dictionary.’
Sculptor Ahuva Zeloof, working in the foundry, by Avshalom Gur
You don’t have to be a lifelong artist to benefit from this kind of mindset. Ahuva Zeloof, unlike Beaumont, Gorky and Wentworth, came to art later in life.
Taking up sculpture professionally in her fifties, after raising four children, is against the norm. But she says the urge to create in some way, whether baking or decorating, was always there. The desire to make is never extinguished. Now in her seventies, she’s preparing for the release of a new body of work and her first book with iconic publisher Silvana Editoriale, titled FAITH.
‘Carrying the stones gets harder,’ Zeloof says. ‘But once I’ve started, I don’t feel like I’m working. I’m in a different place. If I need to do it, I can do it.’ The state of flow, she assures us, transcends aches, pains, and fatigue.
The challenge is not finding the energy, it’s ensuring her ideas remain dynamic. As with Wentworth, this way of being allows her to see beauty in the ordinary: ‘The way that you dress, or cook, or present flowers on a table is art. It’s very satisfying to put things together in a way that looks effortless but intrigues the viewer.’
In conceiving of this article, we wondered if the artists we spoke to would share our anxieties about what legacies we leave, or our fears of decline. But what we found was something rarer. By pursuing a profound connection to the everyday world and their respective crafts, these artists have found a fulfilment that not many of us – young or old – are lucky enough to have. For them, a career in art never ends if they can help it, and being remembered doesn’t matter.
What does matter? Art, only art.
Maro Gorky is represented by Long & Ryle and has two upcoming shows in London:
The Thread of Colour, Saatchi Gallery, 28 March – 13 May
Maps of Feelings, Long & Ryle, 5 March – 2 May (which will show a selection of works on paper by Gorky).
Richard Wentworth is represented by Lisson Gallery
Hanneke Beaumont is represented by Bowman Gallery and has an upcoming show in summer
Ahuva Zeloof’s book FAITH can be pre-ordered on Amazon or via Silvana Editoriale. For more information on Ahuva, please visit her website