Interview: David Galenson
Pondering the nature of artistic genius, a social scientist finds that creativity has a bottom line
- By Helen Starkweather
- Smithsonian magazine, November 2006, Subscribe
WEB EXCLUSIVE - Extended Interview
University of Chicago economist David Galenson recently conducted a quantitative study of artistic greatness. His findings appear in his Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.
What are the two life cycles?
There are two very different types of artists, which I call Old Masters, who work by trial and error and tend to improve with age, and conceptual people, or Young Geniuses, who generally do their best work early in their careers.
How did you measure creativity?
For painters, I looked at auction prices for their works and at art history textbooks and museum retrospectives. In almost all cases, the largest number of an artist's paintings included in textbooks and retrospectives were painted at the same age that his or her works brought the highest prices at auction. For Cezanne, auction prices are highest for works made in the last year of his life, when he was 67. For Picasso, the highest prices were for works he did at age 26. The age at which Cezanne paintings were most likely to appear in textbooks was when he was 67. For Picasso, it was age 26. In the two artists' most recent retrospectives, Cezanne's best year was age 67. Picasso's was 26. I've done this analysis for several hundred artists.
Who fits the Old Masters profile?
Cezanne, of course, but also Rembrandt, whose work got greater and greater to the very end of his life. Louise Bourgeois is an Old Master.
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Comments (2)
Doesn't seem like a statistically significant data set to reach such sweeping conclusions.
Further, identifying someone like Raphael as a Young Genius is meaningless; he died at 37 so there's no telling what he might have done had he lived to old age. A first filter here has to be one which includes artists who lived to old age. Otherwise you will only ever be classifying the likes of Hendrix and Chopin as Young Geniuses as they only fit one of the classifications, having died young, thus skewing the result. More people luve to 35 than 70.
On the photography front, artists like Cartier-Bresson fit both defnitions, by virtue both of his stunning early work of 1932-33 and his mature output in the 1960s. So how do you classify individuals with that profile?
I suspect many more data points are required before any correlation conclusions can be drawn, if indeed there is any correlation, and it's unclear how many individuals Galenson studied. A handful is not a basis for any conclusions.
Posted by Thomas Pindelski on January 9,2012 | 07:32 PM
David Galenson has many interestings things to say about Creativity in general, and about the work of particular artists. But his attempt to put so many people into a simple bipolar strait- jacket is not convincing. Take Picasso. Picasso is described as a 'young genius' who did his most significant work at the age of twenty- six. In fact Picasso was a life- long innovator many of whose major masterpieces including 'Guernica' came when he was well out of his twenties. Picasso furthermore was a constant experimenter and innovator, a continual producer of new styles and modes. He would seem to fit both Galenson's categories, being both a ' conceptual' and 'an experiential' artist. The truth is that each individual creative life is a story of its own. And that in fact 'understanding each of them individually' or each in conjunction with other creators is an not a closed- process but an open- one. There will always be new ways of seeing these great creators which helps us understand them in new ways.
Posted by Shalom Freedman on October 16,2008 | 08:50 AM