Been looking at David Galenston’s two books - thinking I’ll purchase the latest book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.   Got interested in David W. Galenson after reading a review of his ideas in the New York Times today.  

In The Art of Pricing Great Art, the writer, Mr. Leonhardt, expresses the following:

“The mysterious part of the current mania lies in figuring out what exactly makes a piece of art worth $30 million instead of, say, $1 million. Not even people who make their living selling art claim to have much of a definition of great art. In fact, they’re proud not to have one. “That’s where the market becomes magical,” Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, told me.”

In my www.webmetricsguru.com blog - I use with metrics to solve a business need (some times I make my own metrics - you have to be creative - you know); a theory explaining value of a work of art would appeal to someone with my values and way of thinking.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Leonhardt article so I’ll quote from it quite a bit, then comment at the end.

“…..he began collecting data on the sale price of works by Warhol, Jackson Pollock and other American artists, and he discovered a pattern. Most of them produced their most valuable work either very early in their career, like Warhol, or very late, like Pollock. When he expanded his research to European painters, he found the same pattern.

Not only that, but the two groups tended to approach art, and to talk about it, in strikingly different ways. The young geniuses, like Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, were conceptual innovators whose paintings broke sharply from previous work. They typically had a precise goal in mind when they started a piece and didn’t need long to finish it. “Above all, don’t sweat over a painting,” Gauguin once told a friend. “A great sentiment can be rendered immediately.”

The late bloomers, on the other hand, arrived at their innovations gradually, through trial and error, making their major contributions late in life. They painted the same subject again and again, experimenting on the canvas, often reluctant to say that a painting was finished. Consider that Cézanne, who did his most valuable and celebrated work in his 60s, signed few of his paintings.

Mr. Galenson has extended the theory to novelists, poets and beyond, arguing that most creative people fall on one end or the other of the spectrum, and he has earned a fair bit of attention. Malcolm Gladwell, in a speech at Columbia University, described “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” which Mr. Galenson published this year, as “a really wonderful book.” Wired magazine recently profiled him under the headline, “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

Maybe few artists are exactly one type or the other - I believe there is polarity in just about everything - including creativity.

“……If you look through the prices from the current auction season, or walk through any major museum, you can’t help but notice that Mr. Galenson is onto something. When a still life that Cézanne painted at the age of 56, for instance, fetched $37 million at Sotheby’s last week, art experts cited the rarity of Cézanne still lifes. The next night at Christie’s, another Cézanne still life — one painted when he was 34 — sold for just $1.1 million. “

I don’t find that surprising - Cezanne’s late still lifes are much more “unique” than his earlier work - when he was struggling to find himself and his style.  While Cezanne’s early work is notable - yet he had he not evolved his later style and revolutionized art.  Had Paul Cezanne painted his early still lifes, then died all of a sudden, before doing his later work - we’d probably not know he existed today - he’d never become that well known for his early work.

Now, it turns out that Malcolm Gladwell (the same Malcolm Gladwell who I heard at Webmasterworld Pubcon X in Boston, earlier this year) has come to Galenson’s defense and spoke about Galenson’s theory in February at Columbia.   I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Age Before Beauty all the way through and it’s great!

“…way—he’s an economist—the way he decides to analyse great artists is to look at the value of their paintings. How much money do their paintings reach at auction? There’s a big record called the [GuideMayer] which is this big Swiss volume, which records precisely what’s paid for every painting at all the major auction houses of the year, and he basically goes through this thing, combs through it and does these very, very complicated regression analyses based on the size of the painting and when it was painted and how much was paid for it, et cetera. And using this whole kind of thing.

He analyses the value of the paintings of famous artists. And he comes up with this really interesting conclusion, which is that, if you do that kind of analysis, looking at the value of paintings of famous artists over the course of their career, what happens is they divide quite neatly into two groups. There’s a group of artists that do their greatest work very, very early in their career, and then their value declines, and there’s a group of artists who do their very best  work at the very end of their career, right? The very end of life. In other words there isn’t a kind of single profile of what it means to be a successful artist; there’s two.”

“…So he says, look, Pisarro peaks at forty-five, Degas at forty-six, Kandinsky at fifty-two, Georgia O’Keefe at forty-eight. Munch, on the other hand, does his best work at thirty-four, Derain at twenty-four, Braque at twenty-eight, Juan Gris at twenty-eight, and de Chirico at twenty-six.” “……That’s very much the way that experimental artists are working, they’re kind of groping towards something they can’t quite define. Now here, by contrast, is another art historian talking about Picasso: “There was not one Picasso, but ten, twenty, always different, unpredictably changing. And in this he was the opposite of a Cezanne, whose work followed that logical, reasonable course to fruition.” Cezanne famously said, “I seek in painting.” What did Picasso say? He said, “I don’t seek, I find.”“…he looks, for example, at the abstract expressionists and points out, you know, you’ve got a group of older abstract expressionists like Rothko and de Kooning and Jackson Pollock—they’re all guys who peak in their fifties and in some cases in their sixties. It’s a long time to work out their method. And then you’ve got this younger group, you know, Stella, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, who peak, on the contrary, in their twenties, and who have a radically different way of explaining their art, and of doing art and of thinking about art, and that look at the older generation of abstract expressionists and think of them as being kind of antiintellectual, as being kind of mere painters, not kind of thinkers who are possessed of an idea and a concept of how to do art, but guys who are kind of mucking around with paint.”

Ok, I agree with most of this - but what if your the first type of artist -and you may have peaked early but don’t want to accept that your too old to achieve anything lasting now….what do you do?  It’s a question I don’t as yet, have an answer to.