Nine warriors of art who conquered their age

I have been meaning to write about time and ageing for a while now. What prompted me to do so is the autobiography of Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (2001), which I am currently reading. I discovered Tanning a few weeks ago, when I was writing a blog post on “artwives” and instantly became fascinated with this extraordinary woman who, after a few decades of painting and sculpture work, embarked on the second career as a writer, declaring that she preferred to be known as the “oldest living emerging poet.” After her first novel, Clasm was published, one reviewer made an observation that “with the best will in the world, her future potential is unlikely to manifest itself in a lengthy writing career,” as we read in The Telegraph obituary. The second novel, Coming to That, came out only a few months before she died at the age of 101. Dorothea Tanning started her career relatively late, but her dedication to work, never-ending passion and curiosity resulted in an exquisite body of versatile work. Christopher Masters says in the Guardian obituary: “As they gradually outlived many of the first generation of surrealists, Tanning and the British painter Leonora Carrington (a former lover of Ernst’s) faced similar challenges. Instead of becoming avant-garde monuments, they worked into their 80s and continued to exhibit. If anything, in her mid-70s Tanning became more productive than ever.”

Ever since my teenage years, I’ve had something that my old French teacher used to call “the psyche of an old lady.” I’ve been looking at life through the eyes