NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE GREATEST ARTISTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY David W. Galenson Working Paper 11899 http://www.nber.org/papers/w11899 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 December 2005 The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ©2005 by David W. Galenson. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century David W. Galenson NBER Working Paper No. 11899 December 2005 JEL No. J0, J1 ABSTRACT Pablo Picasso was by far the greatest artist of the 20th century: textbooks of art history contain more than twice as many illustrations of his work as of that of his closest rival, Henri Matisse. A survey of textbooks also identifies Jackson Pollock as the greatest American artist, by a narrow margin over Andy Warhol. The 15 greatest artists of the century include nine conceptual innovators, who made their greatest contributions early in their lives, in their 20s and 30s, and six experimental innovators, who generally did their greatest work in their 40s and 50s - and even, in the case of Mondrian, in his 70s. Contrary to the belief of many humanists, the textbooks show that in art, as in all intellectual activities, importance is determined by innovation. David W. Galenson Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER [email protected] 3 Introduction Perhaps the importance that we must attach to the achievement of an artist or a group of artists may properly be measured by the answer to the following question: Have they so wrought that it will be impossible henceforth, for those who follow, ever again to act as if they had not existed? Walter Sickert, 19101 Important artists are innovators: they are important because they change the way their successors work. The more widespread, and the more profound, the changes due to the work of any artist, the greater is the importance of that artist. Recognizing the source of artistic importance points to a method of measuring it. Surveys of art history are narratives of the contributions of individual artists. These narratives describe and explain the changes that have occurred over time in artists’ practices. It follows that the importance of an artist can be measured by the attention devoted to his work in these narratives. The most important artists, whose contributions fundamentally change the course of their discipline, cannot be omitted from any such narrative, and their innovations must be analyzed at length; less important artists can either be included or excluded, depending on the length of the specific narrative treatment and the tastes of the author, and if they are included their contributions can be treated more summarily. The judgments of different authors can of course differ. Surveying a large number of narratives can reduce the impact of idiosyncratic opinions, and serves to reveal the general consensus of expert opinion as to the relative importance of the artists considered. Today, well into the first decade of a new century, it is possible to survey a large collection of narratives of the art of the past century, and to see which artists emerge most 4 prominently from these accounts. One result of this survey is a ranking of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. The Ranking Lists seem trivial, but in fact they are crucial symptomatic indices of underlying struggles over taste, evaluation and the construction of a canon... [T]here is a complex genealogy of influence and indebtedness which is left for critics and historians to unearth. Peter Wollen, 20022 The artists selected for this study are those whose major contributions were made entirely in the twentieth century and who were found to be the most important artists at particular times and places by a series of earlier surveys of art history textbooks. Specifically, 15 different artists were found to have an average of at least two illustrations per textbook in a series of nine previous studies of artistic importance.3 These artists are listed in Table 1. For the present study a new data set was created by recording all illustrations of the work of these 15 artists in 33 textbooks of art history.4 All of these books surveyed the history of art in the 20th century, and all were published in 1990 or later. Table 2 ranks the 15 artists by using the total number of illustrations of each artist’s work that appeared in the 33 textbooks. A number of important facts emerge from this ranking. Perhaps the most striking feature of Table 2 is the dominant position of Picasso. Remarkably, the textbooks surveyed contain an average of 12 illustrations of his work, more than twice as many as the average for his rival and friend, Matisse. Table 2 clearly demonstrates that it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Picasso for 20th-century art. More generally, Table 2 also points to the privileged position given to artistic developments in France. The top five artists are all Europeans, and all spent some if not all of 5 their careers in Paris. Pollock ranks sixth, making him the most important American artist of the century. He is joined in the top 10 by Warhol and Johns. Thus New York is given a prominent role, second to that of Paris. Table 2 provides the basis for a brief overview of the specific roles of the most important artists of the 20th century, and this will be the subject of the following section of this paper. The data set constructed for this study can be used to provide a more precise focus for that overview, by pointing to when each of the artists made his major contribution. Thus Table 3 shows the five- year period in each artist’s career that accounts for the most textbook illustrations. Arranging these periods in chronological order provides quite a precise outline for a consideration of the sequence in which the greatest artistic innovations of the 20th century occurred. Revolutionary Minds Every consequential contribution to l’art moderne has been made by revolutionary minds. Robert Motherwell5 Fauvism was the first significant art movement of the 20th century. Matisse was its leader, and Table 3 shows that his most important period began in 1905, when he and several friends, including André Derain and Maurice Vlaminck, first presented their new work, at the Salon d’Automne. At that exhibition the critic Louis Vauxcelles’ facetious remark gave the group the name of fauves, or wild beasts.6 Fauvism followed the lead of Gauguin and van Gogh in liberating the use of color, but it was more extreme in its anti-naturalistic use of pure bright colors: in Matisse’s words, it was based on the realization “that one could work with expressive colors that are not necessarily descriptive colors.”7 This would later directly influence the Blue Rider movement and many other expressionist artists. 6 Fauvism was a conceptual innovation, based not on visual perception but on an idea. André Gide immediately understood this, as he responded to the widespread claim that Fauvism was irrational by observing that in fact just the opposite was true: “Everything can be deduced, explained... Yes, this painting is reasonable, or rather it is itself reasoning.”8 Matisse was a protean conceptual artist, who went on to make a number of other contributions in his long career. In his famous “Notes of a Painter” in 1908, he explained that his artistic goal was not to imitate nature, but to express his reaction to it: “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.”9 Fauvism was short-lived, and it was soon overshadowed by a very different movement, that was concerned with form rather than color. Cubism was the most important innovation in the visual arts of the 20th century, its preeminence witnessed not only by the dominant position of Picasso in Table 2, but also by Braque’s fifth-place ranking in that table. Cubism is often considered to have been announced by Picasso’s large painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, of 1907, which would become the most important work of art of the 20th century.10 In 1909 Picasso and Braque joined forces, and from then until the outbreak of World War I the two worked, in Braque’s words, “rather like two mountaineers roped together.”11 Cubism revolutionized the representation of forms. Since the Renaissance, the most prevalent approach to form in Western painting had been one-point perspective, which provided a systematic method for recording what the eye sees. Cubism replaced this with a principle that allowed the artist to represent not just what he could see from a single vantage point, but what he knew of his subject as a result of having seen it from many different positions. As John Golding observed, “The Cubism of Picasso and Braque was to be essentially conceptual. Even in the 7 initial stages of the movement, when the painters relied to a large extent on visual models, their paintings are not so much records of the sensory appearance of their subjects, as expressions in pictorial terms of their idea or knowledge of them.”12 In less than a decade the young artists Picasso and Braque, joined in progress by the even younger Juan Gris, successfully established “for the first time in Western art the principle that a work of art..