In the last month, I’ve seen two art installations in New York. Both of them consist of work from earlier times and other places: one focused on 18th-century Salzburg and Vienna, and the other on 16th-century Florence and Rome.
The first, at the Morgan Library and Museum, is relatively small and devoted to the career of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). It features his childhood violin and early musings and scores; there are portraits of the young genius, his ink-stained clavichord, a set of loving letters to his family and wife, and descriptions of his death. The second is a blockbuster exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest ever assembled this side of the Atlantic focused on the life and work of Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520). Sketches, studies, and finished paintings of the Madonna and the artist’s mistress abound. With more than 170 of his drawings and a selection of oil masterpieces on loan from Europe and elsewhere, it’s the major event of the exhibition season and, no doubt, the year.
Mozart was just 35 and Raphael 37 when they died. Admittedly, our life expectancy has much increased since the years of their youth, and it’s now less the rule than the exception that a career ends early. More human beings live longer, and that’s true of artists too.
But we still carry with us the idea that men of genius expire young and not in older age. Substitute Caravaggio or Schubert for Raphael or Mozart and the pattern seems the same. Neither Felix Mendelssohn nor Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec attained the end point of 40; what more might they have done? John Keats—another preternaturally gifted child—was dead at 25. What if Jimi Hendrix or Jean-Michel Basquiat had produced music or art past the age of 27, their last year? The question is always, what if?
