In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art staged the first-ever major retrospective dedicated to the work of Louise Bourgeois. She was 70 years old. The overdue exhibition was intended to solidify Bourgeois’s legacy, to recognize more than half a century of creative output. But Bourgeois would live another 28 years, and would make art until the day she died. What’s more, the pieces from the final stretch of her life were among her best and most innovative. “No one could have guessed,” writes Susan Gubar in her accomplished new book Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists, “that another retrospective would be needed in 2017—to account for the aesthetic breakthroughs of old age.”Bourgeois was far from the only artist who continued to evolve right up until the end of her life. Gubar, a feminist scholar and literary critic, argues that women artists have historically found tremendous freedom in old age, liberated at last from domestic obligations, sexual objectification, and the dominion of men. Grand Finales profiles nine such women — including two visual artists, Bourgeois and Georgia O’Keeffe — to establish a lineage of creatives who reinvented themselves in their final years. Cover image of Susan Gubar’s Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists, 2025, W.W. Norton & Company (image courtesy W.W. Norton & Company) The book is ostensibly powered by Gubar’s scholarly curiosity about the interrelation of creativity and old age. But her research is also rooted in a deeply personal desire for role models who might teach her how to age “with mojo, with panache, with bravura performances of geezer machismo,” to repeat the author’s irresistible phrase. Her chosen artists certainly have lessons to impart, but she wisely eschews hagiography in her profiles. O’Keeffe, for one, proves a prickly character, though her obvious flaws don’t detract from her remarkable last act, when she traded New York for New Mexico, escaping the shadow of her famous philandering husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and producing her most iconic work.No two women’s arcs are alike, through Gubar groups her subjects by common theme: the “lovers” (O’Keeffe and the writers George Eliot and Colette) who drew newfound energy from relationships with younger men; the “mavericks” (Bourgeois, the writer Isak Dinesen, and the poet Marianne Moore) who leveraged their quirky sensibilities to undermine stereotypes about old women; and the “sages” (jazz pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham) who were invigorated late in life by a commitment to social justice. Along the way, she invokes scores of other women artists who remade old age in their own image. Susan Gubar (© Julie Gray)Gubar, herself 80 years old, doesn’t romanticize the experience of aging: she knows firsthand that with it comes a parade of losses, from our strength and mobility to our loved ones. But she takes heart in the dynamism and adaptability of her subjects, many of whom produced their most ambitious and original art as they approached the end of their lives. The book’s in-depth analyses of some of these works can slip into a rather academic register, and may seem dauntingly dense to readers seeking straightforward inspiration, but for the lit crit lovers among us, they prove wonderfully enlightening. Among Gubar’s most interesting findings is how the constraints of getting older can present opportunities to explore new artistic modes. Bourgeois’s late-life sculptures, for example, “grew humungous until, toward the very end of her life, they shrank into small proportions that could be handled at a table in a wheelchair.” Meanwhile, the elder O’Keeffe “often found watercolor, pastel, and graphite easier to use than oils” after losing her central vision at 84.Grand Finales is a rigorous, intellectually rousing portrait of the artist as an old woman, though some biographical sketches prove more compelling than others. Creativity, Gubar concludes, is a muscle that one either uses or loses, and the use of it offers enormous benefits as we age. Artistic projects helped give all the book’s subjects purpose and solace as they navigated impairment and grief. These artists refused to consign themselves to what the author calls “Little-Old-Lady-Land,” and instead opted to keep searching, pushing, and trying new things. Above all, Gubar writes, they shared “an in-your-face audacity that bespeaks a drive to keep on realizing one’s own potential.” Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists by Susan Gubar (2025) is published by W. W. Norton & Company and is available online and in bookstores.