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Blotkamp discerns late style in Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, and Louise Bourgeois--artists who kept innovating over long lives. Others--Blotkamp suggests Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst--seem either to exhaust themselves or to veer from the aerie of lateness into the lower realms of the predictable, old-fashioned, and, perish the thought, commercial. . . . Late style may be the visual expression of what it feels like to face the end--or it may be nothing more than a critic's fantasy, a by-product of our hunger for hidden meanings, narrative closure, and valedictory statements. More likely, it is both at once: the subjective expression of an artist, viewed subjectively. --Max Norman New Yorker

"""Blotkamp discerns late style in Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Max Beckmann, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, and Louise Bourgeois--artists who kept innovating over long lives. Others--Blotkamp suggests Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst--seem either to exhaust themselves or to veer from the aerie of lateness into the lower realms of the predictable, old-fashioned, and, perish the thought, commercial. . . . Late style may be the visual expression of what it feels like to face the end--or it may be nothing more than a critic's fantasy, a by-product of our hunger for hidden meanings, narrative closure, and valedictory statements. More likely, it is both at once: the subjective expression of an artist, viewed subjectively.""--Max Norman ""New Yorker"""

International Association of Art Critics Award (Dutch section) 2021 * Winner * Late style may be the visual expression of what it feels like to face the end – or it may be nothing more than a critic’s fantasy, a by-product of our hunger for hidden meanings, narrative closure, and valedictory statements. More likely, it is both at once: the subjective expression of an artist, viewed subjectively. That’s why lateness means something, if it means anything at all, only in our time-bound experience of late works. There is a specificity – a fragility – to lateness. * Max Norman, The New Yorker * In The End, Carel Blotkamp tells us that the last works of visual artists often have a mythology attached to them. Often this is read into the works retrospectively; we can perceive in last works the summary of a career, and the perfection of a style, such as Mark Rothko’s last paintings, which seem to be an endpoint of abstraction and meditative calm . . . Blotkamp suggests that unfinished paintings – and last works are often and inevitably unfinished – show a more human side to artists, especially, like Raphael, those who are lauded as godlike in their abilities. * Insights Magazine, Australia *

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Carel Blotkamp is Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Art at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and a well-known authority on Mondrian and De Stijl. He is the author of Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (Reaktion, 2001).

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