“Old-Age-Style” or “Sick-Style”? On the Artistic Development of Cognitively Healthy and Cognitively Impaired Artists with Advancing Age

In some older artists with neurodegenerative dementia, the emergence of a new artistic style has been described (“Sick-Style”). “Old-Age-Style” characterizes the artistic development with aging. We sought to determine whether “Sick-Style” and “Old-Age-Style” are different or overlapping entities by two approaches: Five art historians were asked to rate the development from early to late works of seven older, cognitive healthy visual artists and three painters with Alzheimer's disease on a visual analogue scale for 18 criteria from the literature (7 for “Sick-Style,” 11 for “Old-Age-Style”). The works of the three artists with dementia reached significantly higher ratings on the “Sick-Style” items. The scoring for the “Old-Age-Style” criteria, however, varied widely for the different artists. They did not show differences between artists with and without dementia.