Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Female Artists

Memoirist and literary critic Gubar (Memoir of a Debulked Woman) wrestles with mortality and creativity in these graceful profiles of nine female artists who reinvented themselves later in life. After beating a terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis, the author wondered how other female artists dealt with the realities of aging. She explores how painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s “impaired vision” in her latter years inspired her to shift away from brightly colored still lifes to translucent, “elemental” skyscapes painted from memory; how dancer Katherine Dunham’s knee problems led her to devise the “Dunham Technique,” a method that involved isolating certain parts of the body; and how Joan Didion’s late memoirs reveal old age as an opportunity to tell “difficult truths about the female body.” Throughout, the author remains clear-eyed about the challenges of getting older—maintaining agency despite health problems, weathering friends’ deaths—even as she frames it as an opportunity to pursue art free from obligations to work and raise children, and more broadly as a “terra incognita” that provides new material yet is seldom explored in creative work. The result is a wise and inspiring reminder that aging can be full of promise and possibility. (June)