Burning Ambulance: "In 2019, the art historian Carel Blotkamp published The End: Artists’ Late And Last Works, a book that analyzes the work of multiple painters — though Raphael and Piet Mondrian are the only two to get whole chapters to themselves — and discusses which ones developed a new, creative 'late style' (he cites Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois) and which didn’t, instead burning out or becoming clichés (Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst).
In the introduction, Blotkamp writes, 'There is nothing ambiguous about the end of an artist’s creative activity, and we could, conceivably, treat his last work just like any other work. Yet, somehow, things are different. Whether we are amateurs or professionals, we feel compelled to assign the bookend of an artistic career a special meaning… It is almost inevitable that the last work should take on mythical proportions.'
A hundred years earlier, the German art historian A.E. Brinckmann used the term Altersstil ('old-age style') to describe the late paintings of the Old Masters. In a New Yorker review of the Blotkamp book, Max Norman described this as 'the probing, introverted counterpart to the dynamism and extroversion of youth.'"