Verena Lueken: 11 portraits of “old women” past the clichés | EUROtoday

They are typically referred to as previous maids, evil witches or bitter previous folks. Women who supposedly change into furies or self-righteous “Karens” throughout menopause. The latter may be acknowledged by her quick coiffure and the truth that she likes to complain about every part and everybody, not less than that is what the web meme says.

As a girl grows older, it’s typically not her life experiences which are highlighted. “Men become wise. Women become old,” is how Verena Lueken summarizes this unequal view. In her e book, the long-time editor within the FAZ’s options part portrays eleven girls who’re over eighty, together with writers, painters, dancers and filmmakers, with the intention to counteract this inequality.

Of course, the conversations often flip to age, the cult of magnificence and youth insanity. But it is also about loneliness and foreignness, about intercourse and feminism, ambition and braveness. Of course, previous girls even have desires, wants and fears. “The reference point of her life and her thinking is not age,” writes Lueken at the start of the e book. Instead, she acquired to know “discreet feminists, militant intellectuals, lovers, non-conformists” and “discoverers”.

She met with a few of her interviewees a number of occasions and traveled to Berlin, Rome or New York. The proven fact that she visited the ladies the place they stay and work determines the standard of the conversations. Lueken succeeds in fastidiously highlighting the character traits and peculiarities of the “old women”.

Isabella Ducrot, for instance, is a painter and textile artist. She painted her first image in her mid-50s and exhibited it in a gallery for the primary time three a long time later. It was solely within the final third of her life that she achieved worldwide fame along with her colorfully printed woven materials.

Carmen Herrera had an analogous expertise. The now deceased artist from Cuba painted all her life, however solely offered her first image when she was 89. She later turned the primary Cuban lady to open an exhibition on the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The painter instructed Lueken that she could not stand being ignored for therefore lengthy, nevertheless it additionally gave her freedom.

The creator Vivian Gornick explains with putting honesty that work can typically be tough in previous age. On her lengthy walks by means of Manhattan, she made numerous observations, which she wrote down in considered one of her best-known books, “The Odd Woman in the City.” But after a fall, Gornick turned extra anxious and observed that her vitality stage was lowering. Long walks are now not doable.

Love and intercourse do not should be taboo subjects as you grow old, says Jane Campbell. The British author lives in a former pub in Oxford. She has revealed 13 fictional quick tales about previous girls who’ve intercourse and are caring, arguing and manipulating underneath the title “Cat Brushing”. Who do every part that girls are sometimes denied as they grow old.

Finally, choreographer Katharine Sehnert breaks performative boundaries. The former assistant of Pina Bausch was employed for the efficiency venture “Dressing the City,” wherein human actors work together with the stoic buildings and objects within the metropolis. In her mid-80s, she nonetheless performs, as Lueken describes it within the e book, “a kind of pole dance on a lamppost in front of surprised passers-by.” Dressed in an orange observe jacket, black leather-based leggings and crimson ballet flats, she has wrapped the jacket round herself and the lamppost in an virtually pressured embrace.

As trustworthy, willful and free-spirited as all of those girls could also be, they’re not at all marginal figures in society. Verena Lueken succeeds in drawing eleven portraits of those “old women” in a intelligent, unsentimental method, who may be sensible and sensual on the similar time, humorous and managed, free and contradictory.

Verena Lueken: “Old Women”. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2025. 320 pages, illustrations, hardcover, 24.99 euros.