Triumph in the Twilight

What is greatness? That is the implicit question in Richard Lacayo’s new book, Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph. The explicit question is, of course, how artists change as they get older. Lacayo rejects any universal answer to the latter. He’s in favor of “case-by-case examination” of six artists—Titian, Francisco de Goya, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edward Hopper, and Louise Nevelson—instead of a single over-rationalizing thesis. But “however different their later lives may have been, in one way they were the same. They kept working, long enough to express their final insights into life and art through the great last unfolding of their gifts.” Individuality, hard work, maturation: these are the underlying principles around which Lacayo crafts detailed portraits of these great artists and their works.