The Art of Alzheimer’s

This article in today’s NY Times about the self-portraits of an artist with Alzheimer’s struck a chord with me. That’s because I got my 92-year-old father to strike a chord for me yesterday. He had joyously played jazz standards all his life, but now usually declines when I ask him to entertain me. One of my favorite photos of him, a copy of which sits atop my own piano, shows him at the center of a crowd of beer-swilling, cigarette-smoking World War II soldiers in uniform, who sing lustily while he thumps the ivories.
Yesterday, Dad treated my mother and me to all his old arrangements, which I’ve know by heart from childhood. A little rusty, a little scrambled, but they were still in his fingers—an extraordinary feat, considering his memory’s general disarray.
Unmentioned in Denise Grady‘s Times article (in the Health section, not the Arts pages) is the more famous case of an artist who continued to paint while descending into dementia—Willem de Kooning. Grady quotes a neurologist, Dr. Bruce Miller, about the characteristics of Alzheimer’s-influenced art. It’s a description that could be be applied to de Kooning’s late work:
The art becomes more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic. Sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.
I was also struck by the similarity between William Utermohlen‘s last self-portrait (reproduced with the Times piece), and a late skull-like self-portrait of Picasso—the final, harrowing work in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1996 “Picasso and Portraiture” show, so brilliantly curated by William Rubin.