Comment | Perhaps artists do have only ‘ten good years’—but they can happen at any time in their career

Of all the comments describing periods of artists’ work, few are more memorable than the verdict of Douglas Cooper, the fierce Cubist connoisseur and scholar, on late Picasso. Undoubtedly influenced by their personal falling out, Cooper wrote after the Spaniard’s death in 1973 that his final works were “incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death”.

I was prompted to think about Cooper’s lacerating words after seeing Anselm Kiefer: Early Works at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (until 15 June). My thoughts on Kiefer tend to see-saw: I admired his Royal Academy retrospective in 2014, but I wrote of a show at White Cube gallery two years later that Kiefer’s practice, being unrestricted in scale and scope, “feels increasingly incontinent—his studio the conveyor belt primed to fill the world’s expanding mega-galleries with quasi-profound art monsters”.

All of which made the Ashmolean’s show, featuring 45 works made between 1969 and 1982, all the more profoundly affecting. Expertly curated by Lena Fritsch—who has a passion for translating Kiefer’s deep probes into the German psyche for a 21st-century audience in the UK—it is an exhibition about an artist finding himself.

Striking to me was how deftly the young Kiefer switched modes, from arch criticism via flagrant absurdism and wry sardonicism to tender romanticism. The polyptych painting Ich—Du (1971), for instance, might characteristically express Kiefer’s fascination with art history, in nods to Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. But it also reflects a level of emotional intimacy I have not encountered in his work in recent decades. “Du bist das Wasser,” [you are the water] he exclaims to his wife of the time, Julia, with his trademark handwriting, over a shimmering lake; “Daniel kommt” [Daniel comes], a dedication to his son’s imminent arrival, is written above another watery scene. I emerged from the show with the strong conviction that early Kiefer trounces anything he has achieved since.

Mortal danger

It prompted me to think again of the former Tate Gallery director Alan Bowness’s contention that artists have “ten good years” when they “break through and win recognition”, and only “the greatest artists” continue at the highest level “or have other periods when their work excels”. Of course, Picasso is one of those rare artists who excelled in multiple decades. But Cooper is far from alone in dismissing his late work, even if most would not choose his particular language to describe it. I tend to agree with George Melly, who wrote that the late pictures are Picasso’s finest of the post-war period, and that they are moving precisely because he is coming to terms with his mortality.

I suspect that few share my view that Kiefer was at his best before he reached stratospheric fame amid the Neo-Expressionist boom of the 1980s, from which he has never looked back. But this only illustrates to me that true critical consensus about periods of artists’ works is rarely possible.

My feeling is that Bowness’s “ten good years” can come at any point in their career, rather than necessarily from their breakthrough moment. In any case, it seems only fair to apply it to those who are fortunate enough to live long lives. Agnes Martin is untouchably brilliant between the late 1950s and her departure from New York in 1967, when she was 55; Howard Hodgkin’s imperial phase came in the 10 to 15 years after 1975, when he was in his 40s; Louise Bourgeois’s greatest work, to my mind, was made after she returned to art in the mid-1960s, when she was in her 50s—and then again in her 80s in the 1990s.

Still, a certain irresistible allure lies in the analysis of artists’ opening and closing decades, those moments of finding a voice or raging against—or heading gently towards—its silencing. Kiefer is 80 this year, and knowingly nods to his mortality in recent paintings he selected to accompany the early pieces, which relate to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Herbsttag (autumn day). He may be in the autumn of his life, but perhaps he has a memorable decade, or two, ahead.

• Anselm Kiefer: Early Works, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 15 June