Artistic Capital

David Galenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134004027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

At what stage of their careers do great artists produce their most important work? In a series of studies that bring new insights and new dimensions to the study of artistic creativity, Galenson's new book examines the careers of more than one hundred modern painters, poets and novelists to reveal a powerful relationship between age and artistic creativity.

Analyzing the careers of major literary and artistic figures, such as Cézanne, van Gogh, Dickens, Hemingway and Plath, Galenson highlights the different methods by which artists have made innovations.

Pointing to a new and richer history of the modern arts, this bookis of interest, not only to humanists and social scientists, but to anyone interested in the nature of human creativity in general.

Part I
The life cycles of modern painters Evidence from art historians

Lists seem trivial, but in fact they are crucial symptomatic indices of underlying struggles over taste, evaluation and the construction of a canon.

Peter Wollen¹

Art history textbooks provide narratives of the development of painting, and often other arts. In so doing, they describe a canon of important artists. For explicitly or implicitly, every such narrative answers the question, how central is any given artist in the development of his discipline? The authors of the textbooks do this through their decisions about whom to consider and whom to omit. The most central artists – those whose contributions are essential to a coherent narrative – will be discussed in every textbook. Other artists will be omitted from some textbooks; in doing so, historians signal their opinion that these artists are not necessary for their narratives. Seeing how often artists are included or omitted in textbooks therefore effectively allows us to survey a number of art historians’ judgments on the centrality of selected artists to the development of modern art.

1 Quantifying artistic success Ranking French painters – and paintings – from Impressionism to Cubism

Introduction

Robert Storr, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, recently declared that an artist’s success “is completely unquantifiable.”¹ By studying a key group of painters – those who invented and first developed modern art – this chapter shows that quantitative measures not only can produce informative rankings of the relative importance of both painters and paintings, but furthermore can be used to highlight an important difference in approach among major modern artists that has significant implications for our understanding of their careers and their accomplishments. The analysis of this chapter consequently demonstrates that artistic success can be quantified, and that doing so enriches our understanding of the evolution of modern art.

The artists

The goal in choosing the artists to be studied here was to select the most important painters who lived and worked in France, the birthplace of modern art, during roughly the first century of that art’s history. This was done by using five leading texts on the history of modern art.² The first step was to list all artists who had at least one painting reproduced in three or more of these five books. The 27 artists included in this list who had been born in France between 1819 (the birth year of Gustave Courbet) and 1900 were placed in the sample. Another eight artists on the list who were born elsewhere during the same period but who spent substantial portions of their careers in France were also placed in the sample.

The resulting sample of 35 painters is shown in Table 1.1. In addition to Courbet and Manet, who are generally considered key figures in the transition to modern painting, the sample contains the central members of a series of important groups of French artists – the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, and the Surrealists. The sample members therefore include the artists who dominated modern painting in France in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. They also include a number of less prominent artists, and this will serve to test whether the method used here can clearly identify the leading artists.

Table 1.1 Artists included in this study

The data

[Q]uality in art is not just a matter of private experience. There is a consensus of taste. The best taste is that of the people who, in each generation, spend the most time and trouble on art, and this best taste has always turned out to be unanimous, within certain limits. Clement Greenberg³

Texts about art history are also the source of the evidence analyzed in this study. This evidence was drawn from all available books, published in English in the past 30 years, that provide illustrated surveys of modern painting.⁴ A total of 33 such books were found. The data set for this study was created by listing every reproduction of every painting shown in these books by all of the 35 artists in the sample.

Texts on art history were chosen as the source of the data in order to draw on the judgments of art scholars as to the most important painters and paintings. The dozens of authors and co-authors represented include many of the most distinguished art historians, critics, and curators of the recent past and present. Yet regardless of the distinction of the authors, all are likely to be among those of their generations who “spend the most time and trouble on art,” for they have been willing to make the (usually considerable) effort necessary to communicate their views of the history of modern art. Using their work as the source of evidence for this study therefore allows us to survey the views of experts on the composition of the core of modern art. Although the expertise of the authors may vary, the number of books consulted is sufficiently large that no important result depends on the opinions of any one author, or the emphasis of any one book.

This investigation is obviously done in the spirit of a citation study. Yet using illustrations of paintings as the unit of measurement, instead of such alternatives as the number of times a painter or painting is mentioned, has the advantage that illustrations are substantially more costly than written references. In addition to the greater space taken up by the illustration and the greater cost of printing, the author must obtain permission to reproduce each painting, and of course a suitable photograph. This cost in time and money implies that authors may be more selective in their use of illustrations, and that illustrations may consequently provide a more accurate indication than written references of what an author believes to be genuinely important.

The objection might be raised that the paintings reproduced in textbooks are not the most important, but rather the most easily accessible to the author, or those that require the lowest royalty payments. Authors would deny this – Marilyn Stokstad, for example, declares that her book covers “the world’s most significant paintings” – but such claims might be suspected of disingenuousness.⁵ Yet for major artists, whose work has had decades to make its way into museums by purchase and bequest, the constraint posed by ease of access is not likely to bind tightly. Scores of public museums own the work of the artists considered by this study, in quantities generally far greater than the requirements of the textbooks. Even if we restrict our view to a small number of the greatest museums, the numbers of works by these artists are substantial. So for example 35 different works by Picasso just from the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art are illustrated in the 33 textbooks; 19 different illustrated Monets are drawn just from the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, as are 19 works of Degas, and 11 of Manet.⁶ And these museums often hold many more works than are displayed, or reproduced; so for example, Chicago’s Art Institute alone owns a total of 49 paintings by Monet, 31 by Manet, 27 by Picasso, and 18 by Matisse.⁷ The works owned by museums also tend to be important ones, because curators – particularly at major museums – have little interest in acquiring unimportant works. Thus it seems clear that authors can readily choose among large numbers of important works in selecting the paintings to illustrate their textbooks.

The rankings and the puzzles

The two most basic rankings from these data can be presented immediately: Table 1.2 ranks the artists by total illustrations, while Table 1.3 ranks individual paintings by the same measure. For those acquainted with the history of modern art, neither list appears surprising in itself. The artists at the top of Table 1.2 are the greatest masters of modern French painting: Picasso, Matisse, and Braque are clearly the major figures of the twentieth century, as were Cézanne, Manet, and Monet those of the nineteenth. And the paintings in Table 1.3 are all classic works, their images immediately familiar to students of modern art.

Yet puzzles appear when Tables 1.2 and 1.3 are compared. Two of the five highest-ranked artists in total illustrations – Cézanne and Monet – have no paintings among the 10 highest-ranked works in Table 1.3. Cézanne’s only painting in Table 1.3, ranked just twelfth, appears in less than half of all the books surveyed, and Monet’s only entry, ranked in a tie for nineteenth place, appears in only one-third of the books. Furthermore, two artists among the leading ten in Table 1.2, Braque and Degas, fail to have even a single painting among the 21 listed in Table 1.3.

Conversely, some artists ranked below the top group in Table 1.2 have paintings very prominently placed in Table 1.3. Seurat ranks only fourteenth in total illustrations, but his painting of a Sunday afternoon in a park near Paris ranks third in Table 1.3, reproduced in over 70 percent of the books surveyed, more than any other painting executed in the nineteenth century. Duchamp, ranked only eleventh in Table 1.2, remarkably has two paintings among the first seven in Table 1.3 – both of them above any work by such masters as Cézanne, Matisse, and Monet. And not only do Picasso and Manet each have three paintings listed in Table 1.3, but so does Courbet, who ranks only twelfth overall among artists in Table 1.2.

Table 1.2 Ranking of artists by total illustrations

Table 1.3 Ranking of paintings by total illustrations

Why did some of the most important artists not produce the most important individual works? Why were some of the most important individual paintings produced by painters who do not rank among the most important artists? Answering these questions obviously requires consideration of what makes modern painters, and paintings, important.

Importance in modern art

For modern artists, importance is primarily a function of innovation. The central place of innovation in modern art has been generally recognized by critics and scholars. Thus in 1968 Clement Greenberg remarked that “Until the middle of the last century innovation in Western art had not had to be startling or upsetting; since then … it has had to be that.”⁸ Greenberg’s archrival, Harold Rosenberg, stated simply that “the only thing that counts for Modern Art is that a work shall be NEW.”⁹ Meyer Schapiro remarked in 1952 on the “unique intensity of the growth of styles in painting since the 1830s,” and observed: “Every great painter in that period (and many a lesser one) is an innovator in the structure of painting.”¹⁰ Alan Bowness agreed in 1972 that the recent stress on innovation is not new: “we are always persuaded that there has never been a more revolutionary period, never an age when art was more experimental. This remark, however, has been made about contemporary art for a great many years now – certainly since Manet exhibited at the Salon des Refusés [in 1863].”¹¹ Raymonde Moulin observed that “Artists since the impressionists have been in the business of challenging established values and perpetually renovating the house of art. The history of modern art has been one of new tendencies establishing themselves in opposition to the old, only to be quickly challenged by still newer ones.”¹² Michael Fried described the history of modern art as one of “perpetual revolution,” arguing that “the best model for the evolution of modernist painting is that of the dialectic understood as an unceasing process of perpetual radical self-criticism.”¹³ And Leo Steinberg remarked that “Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed.”¹⁴

Since the birth of modern painting in the mid-nineteenth century, artists have made innovations in many areas, including subject matter, composition, scale, materials, and techniques. But whatever the nature of an artist’s innovation, in the long run its importance has been determined primarily by its influence on other artists. The more widespread the adoption of an innovation by other artists, the more important its creator. The importance of individual works similarly depends on the extent of their influence: the most important individual paintings are those that announce the first appearance of innovations that become widely adopted.

Recognition of the key role of innovation in determining the importance of modern painters and paintings allows a restatement of the puzzles raised earlier, derived from the differences in rankings between Tables 1.2 and 1.3. Specifically, why did some of the most important innovators not produce individual works that announced important innovations, and why were many of the most important individual embodiments of innovations not executed by the most important innovators?

Experimental and conceptual innovators

Answering these questions requires recognition of the fact that there have been two very different types of innovation in the history of modern art. What distinguishes them is not their relative importance, for instances of both ran...