The Guardian view on older artists: bridging history and personal life | Editorial

Two pronouncements this week from the world of culture might appear to strike a melancholy note: the film director Ken Loach has declared that The Old Oak, which is due to premiere at next month’s Cannes film festival, may be his last film, while the artist Frank Auerbach, who currently has two shows in the UK, has said that he is in the process of making what may be his final paintings.

But turn those statements on their heads – with due consideration to the conditional “may” – and the picture changes to something worthy of celebration. Mr Loach is 86 and Mr Auerbach is 92 on Saturday, and they are still working. For all the challenges of age that both report, they continue to command the heights of their respective vocations – as does another great 92-year‑old artist Bridget Riley, who is about to unveil her first ceiling painting at the British School in Rome.

To remain so active for so long is, of course, a matter of luck as well as determination, but it’s also about continuing to have something to say. One of Mr Loach’s previous films, I, Daniel Blake, told a story of a failing benefits system in post-industrial Britain that has become ever more pertinent since it was premiered in 2016, taking the Palme d’Or at Cannes. His new film returns to the old mining country of the north-east. These are necessary acts of memory and solidarity from someone who knows what was lost when Britain’s heavy industry collapsed.

As an orphan of the Holocaust, Mr Auerbach is another great observer of a brutal world, whose older work is freshly resonant in a new time of war, while his recent self-portraits are compelling reports from the frontiers of old age. Bearing witness to society’s “changing circumstances and events, to horrors and as well as to wonder” has always been part of an artist’s role, said Ms Riley, in an interview to mark her 90th birthday.

In an age so obsessed with novelty and youth, these perspectives are partly valuable for their rarity. Middle-age – being more ubiquitous – is a harder sell, so the publication of a Women’s prize for fiction shortlist featuring five writers over 50 is in some ways just as refreshing. Barbara Kingsolver and Maggie O’Farrell are no strangers to prize rosters, but three of the six nominees are up for first novels. Cynics might argue that this is just a different vintage of novelty, and for marketing purposes so they are. But importantly, all three debuts engage with lived history: the Jamaican diaspora in 1970s London and Bristol, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.

Much as we should revere those who, like Mr Loach, Mr Auerbach and Ms Riley, have refined and developed their craft and their world views over many decades, there is also a value in those who bring into the cultural arena experiences accumulated outside their chosen art forms. In times as stormy as the one we are currently living through, history is an anchor. We need older writers and artists of all kinds to keep reeling it out.