Late Boomers?

Are they Picassos or Cézannes?

There’s a flurry of 50ish baby boomers entering “second acts.” If they are Picassos, the second half isn’t likely to be any better than the first. If, however, they are Cézannes, these “late boomers” could make a positive contribution in the faith community.

Several years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece contrasting Picasso, a prodigy, and Cézanne, a late bloomer.¹ Picasso’s career as a serious artist began at age 20 with his masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas.” Today, the paintings done in Picasso’s mid-20s are worth an average of four times as much as paintings done in his 60s. For Cézanne, the opposite is true. A late bloomer, the paintings he created in his mid-60s are valued 15 times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man.

This runs contrary to a popular assumption that creativity is a young person’s game. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at 25. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late 20s, culminating, at age 32, with “Moby Dick.” A few years ago, David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago, decided to find out whether this assumption was true. Studying major poetry anthologies as well as great films, he concluded there is no evidence for the notion that prodigies are more creative than late bloomers. Some do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Creativity occurs throughout life. It’s the implications of people peaking early or late that matter the most.

Prodigies start with a road map of where they want to go and then they follow it. For example, Picasso rarely engaged in open-ended exploration. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’” he once said. Late bloomers work the other way around. They follow a compass. Their approach is experimental, Galenson writes. It is the difference between the two approaches that has significant implications.

The first is that prodigies are certain early on about what they want to say. Picasso was very good at his craft at an early age. Cézanne wasn’t. Late bloomers begin by knowing what they don’t want to say. They go against the grain, like an Old Testament prophet. Cézanne was a poor painter in his early years because he was finding his voice, just as Mark Twain did. Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. “The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition,” Gladwell notes, “but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.”

Certainty versus searching yields the second implication—the marketplace works well for prodigies, not for late bloomers. Picasso’s talent was so blindingly obvious that, at age 20, an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris. Late bloomers, on the other hand, start without a plan, and have to experiment and learn by doing. This usually requires patrons to see them through the long and difficult time it takes for their work to reach its true level. In the U.S., where self-reliance is held to be almost sacred, most late bloomers go bust.

“Patron,” writes Gladwell, has “a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace.” But the marketplace rarely supports late bloomers because, as Gladwell notes, it “can’t make sense of them.” Cézanne survived solely because of his small inner circle of patrons that included Emile Zola, his coach; Camille Pissarro, who taught him how to be a painter; Ambrose Vollard, the sponsor of Cézanne’s first one-man show, (when Cézanne was 56); and the banker Louis-Auguste, who first paid Cézanne bills at the age of 22. The “lesson of the late bloomer,” Gladwell concludes, is that “his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.”

The lesson of the prodigy is different. Because they peak early on, they often plateau early, as Picasso did. Bored, prodigies then poke around for a “second act.” A recent Wall Street Journal article told four stories of four people in their “second acts.”² A 62 year-old pathologist became a photographer. “I ran out of passions in the medical field in my mid-50s.” A self-described “workaholic and couch potato” accountant quit his work and now runs marathons at age 66. A 55 year-old woman described putting in 80-hour workweeks as a management consultant in Manhattan. Now she runs a farm producing goat cheese. All three peaked early and then began to pursue other things. One woman, however, seemed different. Barbara Chandler Anderson is 62 years old and today works as director of an educational foundation. She describes it as the culmination of the skills gained from her previous jobs. She lives on a small income derived from patrons. Of the four, which are Picassos? Which are Cézannes?

These questions have implications for the faith community. According to one bestselling author, the driving force in the first half of life is success. After “halftime,” it becomes significance. This sounds suspiciously like Picasso. Success-to-significance might have been the unfortunate experience of the author, but to make it the uniform experience for all is quite another matter. Scripture makes it clear that success and significance matter throughout life. There is no halftime. When Picassos make paradigmatic their particular early-success-and-plateau story, it can create all sorts of problems, especially since midlife boomers are now flocking to seminaries.

According to the Association of Theological Schools, the 50+ demographic now makes up 20 percent of all new students. That’s up from just 12 percent since 1995. If this demographic thinks more like Picasso, it will likely perpetuate the misguided model of success-to-significance. If, however, this demographic includes Cézannes, or “late boomers,” the faith community could gain a prophetic voice that proves false the “halftime” message. It could appreciate how creativity occurs throughout life—and begin to value the work of Cézannes as well as Picassos.

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¹ Malcolm Gladwell, “Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?” The New Yorker, October 28, 2008
² Kristi Essick, Second Acts,” The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2011, R7.