In May 1902, already suffering acutely from the illness that would cause his death the following year, Paul Gauguin wrote from the Marquesas Islands to Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, his most loyal friend, “For two months I have been filled with one mortal fear: that I am not the Gauguin I used to be.” Gauguin’s fear was less for his life than for his art. Shortly before his death, he recorded in his notebook his faith that at any age “an artist is always an artist.” Yet he was forced to continue by posing a question: “Isn’t he better at some times, some moments, than at others? Never impeccable, since he is a living, human being?”1
Great artists whose lives are dominated by the desire to make the most important contributions they possibly can are inevitably drawn to thinking about the relationship between their stage of life and the quality of their work. Sometimes, as with Gauguin, the results are painful to read. In other cases they are amusing. So, for example, Gertrude Stein poked fun at the ambitious young Robert Delaunay. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote of Delaunay’s frequent visits to her apartment in the rue de Fleurus, and his inspection of her remarkable art collection. She recalled, “He was always asking how old Picasso had been when he had painted a certain picture. When he was told he always said, oh I am not as old as that yet. I will do as much when I am that age.”2
Whether their insights were poignant or comical, most artists have considered the relationship between age and the quality of work not in general, but within the specific context of their own careers, in anticipating their future greatness, looking back on the improvement over time in their skills, or worrying about the deterioration of their abilities. Although their awareness of the relationship underscores its importance, their assessments of it obviously cannot be taken to have any degree of generality. Leaving artists’ judgments aside, we can pose very simply the question that I wish to consider: How, and why, does the quality of artists’ work vary with age? The purpose of this book is to present my theory of creative artists’ life cycles, demonstrate how this theory can be implemented empirically, and examine some of the consequences of this analysis.
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, 19103
Shall the painter then . . . decide upon painting? Shall
he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this
supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion
alone has established what even the gentlemen
of the quill accept as the canons of art, and recognize
as the masterpieces of work.
James McNeill Whistler, 18924
There are many common misunderstandings of the history of art, but perhaps none is more basic than the confusion over what determines the quality of art. Although it is of course possible to consider separately the quality of a number of different attributes of an artist’s work, the overall importance of art is a function of innovation. Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors; important works of art are those that embody these innovations. Artists have made innovations in many areas, including subject matter, composition, scale, materials, and technique. But whatever the nature of an artist’s innovation, its importance ultimately depends on the extent of its influence on other artists.
It should immediately be noted that the importance at issue here is not the short-run interest that gains an artist immediate critical or commercial success, but the long-run importance that eventually causes his work to hang in major museums and makes his contribution the subject of study by scholars of art. These two types of success have often coincided, but in many cases they have not. The modern era contains prominent examples not only of great painters, like van Gogh and Gauguin, who were largely neglected in their own time, but also of artists like William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) and Ernest Meissonier (1815–91), whose work was critically acclaimed and highly priced during their own lifetimes, but whose reputations have subsequently declined considerably. It is not surprising that the correlation between short-run and long-run success is imperfect, for recognition of significant innovation often involves a lag, as time may be required for other artists to react to a new practice and adapt it to their own uses. Although these lags have tended to become shorter over the course of the modern era, as the costs of travel and communication have fallen, the time required for influences to appear nonetheless remains variable, because artistic innovations differ in sublety and complexity. Thus whereas some important innovations have diffused rapidly, others have taken hold much more slowly.
During the modern era, the art world has also been an active breeding ground for conspiracy theories. There is a widespread belief, not only among the general public but even among many art scholars, that artistic success can be produced by persuasive critics, dealers, or curators. In the short run, there is little question that prominent critics and dealers can gain considerable attention for an artist’s work. It is equally clear, however, that unless this attention is eventually transformed into influence on other artists, it cannot gain that artist an important place in art history in the long run. Thus Harold Rosenberg, who was himself a prominent critic, recognized in 1965 that “the sum of it is that no dealer, curator, buyer, or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.” And Rosenberg furthermore declared that a painter who influenced his peers could not be ignored by the art world: “A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.”5
Recognizing that innovation is the source of genuine importance in art allows us to understand precisely what it is about the life cycle that concerned Paul Gauguin, Robert Delaunay, and many others who have sought to become great painters. For the question of how the quality of artists’ work varies with age can be restated as the question of why different artists have innovated at different ages. Answering this question is the task for this study.