When Does a Woman Artist Reach Her "Prime"?

Marc Straus Gallery in New York has gathered 18 women artists, all over the age of 75, for "The Prime of Your Life," an exhibition that poses a sharp question for 21st-century feminist art history: what does "prime" mean for a woman artist, when the market and museums are most likely to valorize her work only in old age?

The show takes its conceptual cue from Linda Nochlin, the feminist art historian whose 2008 essay "Old-Age Style: Late Louise Bourgeois" opens with a pair of pointed questions: "What is an 'old-age style'? Is it the same as a 'late style'?" Nochlin examined Bourgeois's aesthetics across a seven-decade career, with particular attention to the soft and hard qualities of the work. She asked how a work made at the end of an artist's life changes our interpretation of one made at the beginning.

Borrowing from the late Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said, Nochlin concluded that "late styles abandon all the comforting segues and aesthetic connections that hold the art object together, dealing instead with disconnects, abysses, unyielding dislocation and unresolved contradiction." Late style, in other words, forces viewers to contend with shifts and disruptions in artistic focus — tied to biography or not — that resist neat incorporation into historical assessments of earlier work.

What holds the exhibition together?

Only the artists' age. The exhibition spans painting, drawing, sculpture and installation in wildly different scales, forms and techniques. The result reads less as unified harmony than as a series of calls and responses — less a generational statement than a critical interrogation of how women artists' careers are valued, and when.

How does Marina Abramović fit in?

Marina Abramović's photograph "Standing with Skeleton" (2008/2016), installed near the gallery entrance, introduces the question. The large-scale image shows the artist in black against an equally inky background, an ivory skeleton atop her back. Over 50 years, Abramović has almost always used her body in performance-driven work, trading subtlety for straight-on confrontation — most poetically in her 2010 epic performance and exhibition "The Artist Is Present," regarded as a career zenith, in which she stared opposite another individual during museum hours.

Measured against the rigor and passion of those live performances, the photograph feels, at best, inanimate; at worst, almost a parody of her practice. The skeleton reads more like lighthearted Halloween decor than an elegiac meditation on old age. Does knowing the strength of Abramović's earlier work make this a comic pastiche? Is it fair to compare? Does a lesser, later work diminish a stronger, earlier one? The exhibition leaves these questions unresolved — and suggests that at 79, Abramović may just be hitting her prime, with an epoch of work on the horizon.

The show's wager is that "prime" is not a fixed moment but a moving target, and that late work may yet rewrite everything we thought we knew about the early.