ABSTRACT
The idea of late style is not venerable. It emerged in musicology and art history in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century and a few decades later in literary criticism, serving to replace earlier models of the artistic trajectory such as the Virgilian. As a concept, however, late style also has obvious limitations. Deriving as it does from the larger concept of genius, the idea of late style is bound to the Romantic moment, bringing with it certain assumptions that we may now find problematic, not least its intrinsically undemocratic orientation and its privileging of male creativity over female and of white Western creativity over that of other parts of the globe; it also runs into serious trouble with forms of art that wilfully refuse to be understood as the artist’s self-expression in the way assumed by Romanticism. The materials of late-style theory tend, by definition, to be those of high art.
