“Late style” is what is supposed to happen to gifted, long-lived artists. At best, it manifests itself as a bold expansion of ideas implicit in earlier work or as a reckless exploration of new possibilities. The most exciting late style works seem fearless, as if the maker’s accumulated experience of thinking about, looking at, and making art over a long working life is so powerful that it obliterates all preconceptions of what a work of art could or should be. Think of Titian’s or Rembrandt’s roughly brushed, introspective, emotionally charged paintings of their last years, which thumb their noses at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas about finish, “correctness,” and touch. Think of Monet’s flickering, elusive images of his lily pond or the Japanese bridge that spanned it, which reinvent landscape painting as a dense fabric of overscaled brushstrokes and disorienting space. Or Matisse’s rigoro ...

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