During my senior year in college I was very busy writing an honors thesis in economics. To give myself a break from that work, in the spring I took several courses in other departments, one of which was a survey of the history of modern art. The course was fascinating, for it focused on a series of important innovations that had dramatically changed fine art in barely more than a century. The course covered the development of modern art through the 1960s, and one of the things that struck me during the last few weeks of the semester was how young the leading painters of that decade had been: Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, and a number of their friends were hardly beyond college age themselves when they made the paintings we studied.
The course greatly increased my enjoyment of contemporary art, and during the years that followed I had the opportunity to visit a number of museums that have excellent collections. One effect of these visits was to reinforce my observation about the youth of the major artists of the 1960s, for although the best museums concentrated on the late work of the Abstract Expressionists who dominated the 1940s and ’50s, they also consistently gave pride of place to the early works of the Pop artists and the other leading members of the next generation of painters. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, which may have the single best collection of recent American art, consistently displays paintings Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Frank Stella made before they had reached the age of 30.
By 1997 I had spent nearly a decade working on a large and detailed study of the economic mobility of immigrants and their children in nineteenth-century American cities. To take a break from that research, I decided to devote part of the summer to a systematic examination of the careers of some of the American artists I had first studied in college, by looking at how the prices their paintings brought at auction were affected by the ages of the artists when the paintings were produced. When I first began to collect auction prices for the work of several dozen important American painters, I had no idea that this would eventually lead to a new understanding of the life cycles of human creativity; in fact, I didn’t know then what the current theory of this was, or even that there was one. Yet what I would learn during the next seven years not only would make me aware of the pronounced differences in the methods and careers of experimental and conceptual innovators in the arts, but also would serve as a vivid illustration of how radical and unexpected the results of the gradual process of experimental research can be. During that time a series of many small steps, each directly motivated by what I had learned in the past few weeks or months, produced a cumulative effect that is as surprising to me as it may be to many readers.
My initial analysis of the auction prices for the American painters produced the puzzling result that the work of some artists (including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko) increased in value as their careers progressed, whereas other artists (including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol) produced their most valuable work at very early ages. To understand why these age-price profiles differed so much, I began to look in more detail at the careers of individual painters. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but among the things I considered were how the artists worked, what their goals were, what was distinctive about their art, and when they made their most significant contributions. This led to my initial recognition that the two different patterns of prices over the artists’ life cycles were indicators of very different patterns of artistic creativity over the life cycle, which in turn were associated with very different artistic goals and very different methods of making paintings. For the first time I began to understand that the young artists of the 1960s produced works that differed so completely from those of their predecessors because they used fundamentally different methods in the pursuit of fundamentally different goals.
This was the beginning of an exciting period of discovery, as I progressively expanded my study to larger numbers of important modern painters to see whether my initial generalizations would hold up. Much to my surprise, they did, and a vast amount of detailed analysis and information that art scholars had collected about great modern painters began to fall into consistent patterns. The realization that my analysis afforded significant new insights into the history of modern art eventually prompted me to write a book, using the analysis of the two patterns of innovation to inform a narrative of several central episodes in the development of modern painting.
After that book was completed, I continued to extend my analysis to other groups of modern painters, and I continued to discover new implications of the analysis. During this time, however, I began to suspect that the behaviors I had identified in modern painting, with the basic distinction between experimental and conceptual approaches, were much more general characteristics of most, if not all, intellectual activities. I was initially reluctant to act on this suspicion, because I was enjoying being immersed in the history of modern painting, but eventually my curiosity prompted me to study another art. My research on painters had shown me the great value of being able to consult high-quality critical literature, so I first decided to study a sample of important modern poets. As I began to learn about the goals, methods, and achievements of these poets, I was delighted to see how well the experimental and conceptual categories could be translated to literature, and I was startled to discover how well the analysis could predict the patterns of poets’ life cycles of creativity. After the pilot study of poets I studied a group of modern novelists, and I had the same shock of recognition as I learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and the development of their work through their lives, and I again saw how readily many of the facts collected by literary scholars about these writers could be organized into systematic patterns. And as was the case for painters, I saw the surprising benefits of applying this analysis to poets and novelists, as many previously puzzling aspects of their behavior and the development of their work could be explained as general characteristics of types of artists.
This book provides an overview of my research on the life cycles of artistic creativity. Beginning with painters, it shows how we categorize artists, and how we can measure their creativity over the course of their careers. It then considers some extensions of the analysis and discusses a number of implications for our understanding of modern painting. The book then applies the analysis to other groups of important artists, treating in turn painters before the modern era, modern sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors. The final chapter places the results in a broader perspective and considers not only how this research compares to artists’ and psychologists’ views of artistic life cycles, but also how it contributes to our understanding of human creativity in general, and how it might help us to increase our own creativity.
I hope this book will lead to both more and better research on individual creativity. This is a subject economists have not considered, and I hope my work will show them both the value of adding it to their research agenda and the rewards from analyzing individual life histories. Psychologists have studied the creative life cycles of exceptional individuals, but for reasons I explain in the last chapter I believe their work has been flawed, and I hope they will use my results to improve their research. Humanists typically view the life cycles of individual artists in isolation, and I hope my work will show them the value of systematic comparative research.
I hope this book will influence researchers in these disciplines, but I also hope it will find an audience of nonspecialists. One of the greatest satisfactions of this work for me has been the deeper understanding it has given me of the arts I have studied. I hope that others who enjoy these arts will recognize the rewards that follow from a more systematic approach to them, and will share my experience that it increases the pleasure they derive from looking at paintings or reading novels.
Many people have helped me with this research, in a variety of ways, but two have taught me the most, and I am greatly indebted to them. Early in this project I read an intriguing book on the origins of the market for modern art by Robert Jensen, a professor of art history at the University of Kentucky. When I got in touch with him, his enthusiasm for my research led to a remarkable series of conversations that continues today. In the course of these frequent discussions, with unfailing graciousness Rob has given me the benefit of his vast knowledge of art history. His patience, open-mindedness, and intellectual curiosity have made our discussions as enjoyable as they have been valuable. I would have done this research without Rob’s help and encouragement, but it would have been more difficult, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.
When I began to extend my research beyond painting, I had the good fortune to hire Joshua Kotin, a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, as a research assistant. I soon discovered that Josh had a deep understanding of both modern poetry and fiction, and during the past two years, with admirable tact and efficiency, he has greatly increased my understanding of the development of modern literature. Josh’s constructive criticism and broad knowledge have improved my work on poets and novelists, and have given me a greater appreciation for the accomplishments of these writers.
The outline of this book originated in a paper I presented at a conference titled “Measuring Art” at the American University of Paris in May 2003. I thank Gerardo della Paolera, the president of AUP, for his hospitality, and Martin Kemp and Camille Saint-Jacques for their comments on my work at the conference.
Clayne Pope always read my work in economic history and discussed it with me, and I appreciate that he has continued to do this in spite of my change of course. Morgan Kousser’s enthusiasm for my research on painters, and his willingness to publish my early papers in Historical Methods, provided welcome encouragement.
Among my colleagues at the University of Chicago, I am grateful to Fernando Alvarez, Jim Heckman, Richard Hellie, Ali Hortacsu, Emmet Larkin, Bob Lucas, Derek Neal, Yona Rubinstein, Allen Sanderson, Josh Schonwald, Hugo Sonnenschein, and Lester Telser for suggestions and discussions. Among those elsewhere, I thank Andy Abel, John James, Julia Keller, Aaron Kozbelt, Gracie Mansion, Ralph Petty, Magda Salvesen, Colin Stewart, Bruce Weinberg, and Michael Zickar for useful discussions. I am also grateful to participants in seminars at the University of Chicago, New York University, the University of North Carolina, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and in sessions at the annual meetings of the Southern Economic Association, the American Economic Association, and the National Art Education Association, for their comments. Laura Demanski and Peter Northup performed excellent research assistance. A grant from the National Science Foundation provided financial support for much of this research.
At Princeton University Press, I thank Tim Sullivan for his interest in my work.
Shirley Ogrodowski learned firsthand the drawbacks of experimental research projects, as she typed what must have seemed like an endless series of revised chapters of this manuscript. As always, I am grateful for the efficiency and unfailing good cheer with which she did this.