Never too late
AT 76, CLINT EASTWOOD is making the best films of his career. "Letters from Iwo Jima" has been nominated for four Academy Awards -- including best picture and best director. ("Flags of Our Fathers," which Eastwood also directed last year, received two nominations.) New York Times' film critic A.O. Scott recently named him "the greatest living American filmmaker." Such accolades are the latest development in Eastwood's creative ascension. Two years ago, his "Million Dollar Baby" won best picture and best director, a repeat of his success with "Unforgiven" at age 62 -- his first Oscar after making movies for more than 20 years.
Sculptor Louise Bourgeois is 95. Later this year, she will be honored with a retrospective at London's Tate Modern museum. Last November, her "Spider," a sculpture she made at the age of 87, sold at auction for more than $4 million, the highest price ever paid for her work and among the highest ever paid for the work of a living sculptor.
Is such creativity in old age rare? Eastwood and Bourgeois often are considered anomalies. Yet such career arcs -- gradual improvements culminating in late achievements -- account for many of the most important contributions to the arts. That our society does not generally recognize this fact suggests that we're missing a key concept about creativity.
We often presume creativity is the domain of youth, that great artists are young geniuses, brash and brilliant iconoclasts. Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jasper Johns all revolutionized their artistic disciplines in their teens or 20s. (Picasso, for example, created the first cubist paintings at 25, and Welles made "Citizen Kane" at 25.) These artists made dramatic, inspired discoveries based on important new ideas, which they often encapsulated in individual masterpieces.
But there's another path to artistic success, one that doesn't rely on sudden flashes of insight but on the trial-and-error accumulation of knowledge that ultimately leads to novel manifestations of wisdom and judgment. This is Eastwood's and Bourgeois' path -- and it was the path for a host of other artists: Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. (Twain wrote "Tom Sawyer" at 41 and bettered it with "Huckleberry Finn" at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91.)
