by Jon Lackman | 17 November 2006 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times: “David W. Galenson, an art lover, modest collector and tenured professor of economics at the University of Chicago … has developed something approaching a unified theory of art, which hasn’t won him many fans in the art world but does a surprisingly good job of explaining the relative value of the world’s great paintings … 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 himself says: ‘The art historians and art critics won’t look at my work. They just assume I’m an idiot.’”
