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Late work forms a special, often underrated category in an artist’s oeuvre. Tom Morton look at a pair of striking sculptures by Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Caro and wonders whether this lack of appreciation is actually deserved.‘He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent’. So begins Philip Roth’s novel The Humbling (2009), in which the septuagenarian writer tells the tale of a sexagenarian actor, fated to live through the death of his talent. Edging onto the stage, the actor feels a sudden and unfamiliar self-consciousness: ‘All that had worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic’. For Roth, the departure of the artist’s ‘magic’ (including, perhaps, his own) does not create an absence, but rather a monster, a terrible beast of over-amplification and self-pastiche. In a culture that places a high value on the young and the new, an artist’s late work is often approached with wariness, as though talent, or at least relevance, were something that faded as automatically and inevitably as physical beauty. To some degree, we might ascribe this to the rhythms of late capitalism, although commercial galleries, like record labels, seem to have little trouble shifting units by established older artists, even when they are long past what we might consider to be their prime. There are, of course, many powerful counter-examples we might offer (the weird vitality of the paintings made by, say, Goya or Picasso in their final years), and also a growing preoccupation in certain youthful curatorial circles with ‘discovering’ previously neglected figures (or, as a friend of mine puts it, with creating ‘newly fashionable oldies’), but as doubtful as the notion that age necessarily brings with it a Rothian ‘humbling’ might be, it still casts a long shadow over how most artists’ late work is understood. What is unquestionably true is that an artist nearing the end of his or her life faces a distinct set of questions. To be able to take a long look back over one’s practice, to be able to see the shape it has taken over many decades, is to surely feel a very different set of inhibitions and freedoms than those felt by somebody whose career is in its first flower. There may be questions of legacy, of extending one’s temporal reach beyond the years that one has inhabited. Often, if one has become and stayed successful, there will be resources and opportunities available that would have dazzled one’s younger self. There is always, inevitably, a deal to do with death.

Clanking Robot

Cast by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) in the last decade of his life, Newton, after Blake (1995) sits in the forecourt of the British Library in London – a structure described by its architect Colin St John Wilson as a ‘magic mountain of all the knowledge in the world’, and by one of Wilson’s obituary writers as ‘the last great public building of such scale and seriousness that we shall ever see’. (Is it the obituarist’s lot, I wonder, to see in the death of a particular human subject the attendant death of an idea?) As the sculpture’s title indicates, its form is borrowed from a work by the English poet, printmaker and visionary William Blake: a 1795 colour monotype depicting Sir Isaac Newton sitting on a rocky outcrop at the bottom of the sea, compass in hand, bent over a scroll bearing the image of a triangle, symbol of a Trinitarian God. Blake, here, is in attack mode. On the dark ocean bed, far from the bright lights of Heaven, the father of modern physics attempts to measure the immeasurable, and to divide the indivisible. Like Plato’s cave dwellers, he inhabits a circumscribed reality, a dim and hellish spot in which his beauty (echoing that of Blake’s Satan, a blonde and lithe-limbed rebel angel) is witnessed only by the blind weeds that swirl about his cold and stony seat. Paolozzi’s Newton is not beautiful. Paolozzi’s Newton is a techno-organic monster, bolted at his knees and elbows like a clanking robot from a Cold War-era sci-fi movie. Approach him from the front, and you find yourself confronted by a bronze goliath in a bad wig, the eyes in his weirdly too-wide face shaded by a pair of futuristic sunglasses. Approached from the rear, he is a great knot of impossible Blakean musculature, gathered above a pair of deflated buttocks that perch, a little primly, on what appears to be a flat-pack Ikea stool. Only when he is seen from the side – as in Blake’s print – does his clumsiness, even silliness, vanish, and his sculptural authority begin to assert itself. Oddly, Newton, after Blake’s white stone and orange brick plinth is integrated into a long, raised flowerbed which discourages the viewer from walking around it, as though Paolozzi was aware that this is a work that only really functions when seen in profile. It is an uncomfortable solution to an uncomfortable problem: the largest figurative sculpture in London, bent double as though it were attempting to fold itself back into the flatland of the printed image, or even the spacelessness of the page. During my student years at the turn of the last millennium, a period in which the Young British Artists became firmly established as the semi-official state artists of Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’, I spent a lot of time at the British Library, which meant I spent a lot of time taking cigarette breaks in its forecourt. There, beneath the building’s clock tower (an elegant swipe from Willem Marinus Dudok’s 1928 Hilversum City Hall), I’d look up at Paolozzi’s strange, ungainly sculpture, and try to work out what made it feel so different from what I’d come to understand as contemporary British art. Partly, of course, it was its unfashionable, almost scholarly referencing of historical figures – the YBAs may have made the occasional, rather facile allusion to Bacon or Warhol, but their particular brand of refried pop-punk was unlikely to bother itself with an eighteen-century proto-hippy such as Blake, let alone his condemnation of Newton’s scientific materialism. Partly, too, it was Paolozzi’s unapologetic use of bronze, which at that moment still felt too close to the old establishment for the new establishment to take it to heart.Mostly, though, it was its very different approach to time, and artistic risk. Newton, after Blake is a work made in the knowledge that it will remain in place for many years after its maker’s death, perhaps until the British Library (that ‘last great public building’) is finally abandoned, along with the values it speaks of and upholds. Even then, Paolozzi’s bronze may eke out a berth as an archaeological curio, a crouching colossus regarded by unimaginable future eyes. Such thoughts are liable to encourage any artist towards the grandiose, but there is something oddly reticent about this sculpture. Blake, who practiced nudism with his wife in his Lambeth garden, would perhaps note that it hides its genitals and its heart.

White Barbarians

The strangeness of Paolozzi’s British Library golem begins to come into focus when we compare it to a late work by one of his contemporaries, Anthony Caro, also born in 1924. Caro’s Chapel of Light (2008) at the Church of St. Jean Baptiste in Bourbourg, Northern France, shares Newton, after Blake’s desire to speak of supposedly timeless values through the dying language of post-war British sculpture, but it does so with a confidence that is entirely lacking in Paolozzi’s work. Looking at Caro’s interventions in the church’s choir and naves – including a concrete baptismal pool, two huge oak towers used for musical performances, and a series of steel, wood and terracotta reliefs that reference the Biblical myth of Genesis – they seem like utterly trivial additions to his oeuvre when compared to the revolutionary works he was making in the 1960s, such as Early One Morning (1962), and there is something unforgivable about the bland and tacky way the whole project implies a link between artistic and deistic creation.Nevertheless, where Paolozzi’s sculpture is awkward, Caro’s are self-assured, as though his late entry alongside Matisse and Rothko on the short list of major twentieth-century artists with a chapel to call his own was too big a thing to allow doubt to creep in. It is precisely this quality, though – Paolozzi’s sense that ‘All that had worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic’ – that gives Newton, after Blake its peculiar power. In Mark Leckey’s 2006 video March of the Big White Barbarians (2005), the work features in a slideshow of unloved London public sculptures (others include Bruce McClean’s Eye 1, 1993, and Pierre Vivant’s Traffic Light Tree, 1995-8), which has a sound-track that ends with the words ‘Everything’s been eaten. Everything’s been drunk. There’s nothing more to say, so I’ll just watch the big white barbarians passing by’. It’s hard not feel a similar finality when confronted with Paolozzi’s sculpture. This is an artwork that seems to sense it belongs to the end of things: a career, a life, a particular model of the public realm. A couple of years before I first saw Newton, after Blake, I found myself in Coronation Park, Old Delhi, standing in front of another late work by another British sculptor. Charles Sargeant Jagger’s huge, pale white marble statue of a British king, George V (1935), was made in the final months of the artist’s life, and became, a year later, an unexpected memorial to its subject, who died in 1936 as the last-but-one Emperor of India. In many ways it is nothing more than a politically distasteful artefact of colonialism, but it has a formal uneasiness that, even then, made me take a second look. A sculptor who attempted throughout his career to fuse what was an essentially Victorian take on Classicism with a hesitant Modernism, Jagger depicted the king with a wobbling, too-big crown, and a vastly long cloak than envelops not only him, but most of the plain, geometric plinth on which he stands. Like Newton, after Blake (a sculpture, as we’ve seen, that seems to dream of reducing its three dimensions into two), George V is a monster that’s all too aware of its own reflection, a big white barbarian that longs to disappear. Perhaps this, in the end, is what all the best late works do. Tom Morton is a writer, curator and contributing editor of frieze, based in LondonNotes1. Philip Roth, The Humbling (London: Vintage Paperback Edition, 2010), p. 12. Idem, p. 2