Editor’s Note: Professor David Galenson has become famous
for postulating a new theory of artistic creativity. Based on a study of the
ages at which various innovative artists made their greatest contributions to
the field, Galenson's theory divides all artists into two classes: Conceptualists,
who make radical innovations in their field at a very early age; and Experimentalists,
whose innovations develop slowly over a long period of experimentation and
refinement. Although Galenson initially developed his theory from data solely
concerning the visual arts, he has since also investigated conceptual and
experimental innovators among poets, novelists, film makers, popular musicians
and economists.
 |
|
T. S. Eliot and Mark Twain
|
By David Galenson
Most of the
greatest individual masterpieces in the modern arts have been made by
conceptual innovators.
Until recently, research on this question
had been the exclusive province of psychologists. Studies date back as far as
1953, when Harvey Lehman published Age and Achievement, a
book based on an enormous amount of evidence from practitioners of disciplines
ranging from academia to politics. Lehman created age distributions for
important achievements in dozens of activities, then used these distributions
to identify "the maximum
average rate of highly superior production."
So, for example, he concluded that the
most productive ages were 32-36 for painters, 26-31 for lyric poets, 40-44 for
novelists and 35-39 for movie directors. Lehman’s research has been widely
accepted, and other psychologists have echoed his conclusions. In 1993, Howard
Gardner of Harvard observed that "while
other kinds of writing seem relatively resistant to the processes of aging,
lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly and
then peters out at an early age."
In 1994, Dean Simonton of the University
of California at Davis similarly remarked that "in some fields, creative productivity comes and goes like a meteor
shower; the peak arrives early, and the decline is unkind. In other creative domains,
the ascent is more gradual, the optimum point is later, and the descent is more
leisurely and merciful." He added,
"In the arts, for example, the curve for
writing novels peaks much later than that for poetry writing."
During the past decade, I have studied the
relationship between age and creativity for important practitioners of a number
of different arts. To my surprise, I have discovered that Lehman, Gardner and
Simonton (and many others) were wrong. There seem to be two sorts of life
cycles of creative accomplishment within each artistic activity I have studied.
Furthermore, the paths that individual artists follow don’t seem to be randomly
divided between the two; rather, they are related to their artistic goals and
to the methods they use. Here, I describe the two types of innovators, offering
examples of practitioners of both types in four modern arts: painting, poetry, novel
writing and movie direction.
Although I’ve limited the analysis to
artists, I believe that it could be extended to nearly all intellectual
activities. Thus, both types of innovators described below can be found in all
academic disciplines, as well as in business. The broad applicability of this
linkage between creativity and age obviously increases the importance of
studying the two types of innovators in detail, as it holds clues to how to
increase the contributions of those rare individuals who can make a huge
difference in science, technology and business.
Who Makes a Difference
The most important artists are those who
innovate. While the innovations vary widely in form and content, their impact
depends on how much they influence other artists. Hence, the more widespread
the adoption of an innovation, the more important its creator. Note, by the
way, that this notion of importance allows the concept to be measured.
There is little doubt that critics and
dealers can manufacture attention for artists. Unless this attention influences
other artists, however, the flame will be short-lived. It is only influential
artists whose paintings are hung in museums or whose writings are the subject
of research a century later. Thus, when we study the life cycles of artistic
creativity, what we must explain is the relationship between artists’ ages and
the production of their most influential works.
Old Masters and Young Geniuses
I call one group of innovators "experimenters," and the other "conceptualists."
Experimental artists are seekers. Whether they
use paint, words or film, they typically have ambitious but imprecise aesthetic
goals, for they aim to present accurate accounts of the world as they see and
experience it. Experimental writers, for example, generally try to describe
realistic characters in realistic situations. Experimental artists’ most basic
characteristic is persistent uncertainty about their methods and goals: they
are usually dissatisfied with their current work, but have only vague ideas
about how to improve it.
Their dissatisfaction leads them to change
their art, while their uncertainty means that they do this cautiously, moving
by trial and error toward imperfectly perceived objectives. They generally
believe that the essence of creativity lies in the process and that their most
important discoveries are made while they are working. As a result, they spend
little time planning their works, preferring to find the final form in the
process.
No matter how great their progress, their uncertainty
rarely allows experimenters to consider their works a complete success. One consequence
is that they often see their work as unfinished. Another is that they often
work in series, producing sequences of works that are closely related. Experimental
artists’ innovations appear gradually over extended periods; they are rarely
declared in any single work, but appear piecemeal in a large body.
Conceptual artists, by contrast, are
finders. Their art is intended to communicate ideas or emotions. Their goal is
consequently not to describe their subjects objectively or realistically, but
to create stylized images that express their feelings about subjects. Their purpose
in a particular work can usually be stated precisely in advance of its
production; conceptual painters, therefore, often make detailed preparatory
plans for their work.
Because their creations are carefully planned,
they typically consider the execution of the final product perfunctory, and
they may even have it crafted by others in a workshop setting. Conceptual artists
often express their ideas through such devices as symbolism or allegory. For
writers, this frequently involves the creation of one-dimensional characters whose
role is to carry out plots that are carefully constructed and resolved.
Conceptual art is frequently based not on
observation of the real world, but rather on the work of earlier artists transformed
by the artist’s imagination. Conceptual innovations appear suddenly with the formulation
of a new idea, and they are often embodied in individual breakthrough works. One
consequence is that most of the greatest individual masterpieces in the modern
arts have been made by conceptual innovators.
Unlike experimental artists, whose
inability to achieve their imprecise goals can tie them to a single problem for
a whole career, the conceptual artist’s satisfaction that a problem has been
solved can lead him or her to consider a particular work a success, and thereby
free him or her to pursue new goals. The careers of some conceptual artists
have consequently been marked by discrete innovations, each quite different
from the others.
The life cycles of great experimental and conceptual
innovators tend to be very different.
The long periods required for the gradual development
of their art implies that experimental innovators generally make their greatest
contributions late in their careers. Conceptual innovations, by contrast, are
made quickly and can occur at any age. But the boldest and most important ones
are usually made early in an artist’s career, before habits of thought have
become firmly established. The extreme simplifications of radical conceptual
innovations are also most readily made by young artists, whose view of the
world is often less complicated than that of older artists. Thus, whereas experimental
innovators are art’s wise old masters, conceptual innovators are its precocious
young geniuses.
Painters
In 1906, Paul Cézanne died in the south of
France at the age of 67. Severely ill with diabetes, he had collapsed after
being caught in a thunderstorm while painting in the hills above his studio. He
was carried home after being exposed to the rain for hours and died a week
later. Cézanne’s persistence in going into the countryside to paint in spite of
his illness was a consequence of both his conviction that vision was
fundamental to his art, and his frustration with his inability to portray nature
in all its complexity. Just a month before his death, he had written to his
son: "I cannot attain the intensity that is
unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of coloring that
animates nature."
Cézanne, who declared that “I seek in painting,”
is an archetypal experimental artist. The irony of his expression of
frustration at the end of his life stems not only from the fact that within a
few years the reclusive artist would come to be recognized as the greatest painter
of his generation, but that it would be the work of his last few years that
would inspire every important artist of the next generation. The art historian
Meyer Schapiro described Cézanne’s art as "a model of steadfast searching" that culminated in a final "period
of magnificent growth." Art
historians widely agree that his late work was his greatest. Indeed, a survey
of art history textbooks shows that the paintings from the final year of his life
are the most likely to be reproduced.
In the spring of 1907, the 25-year-old Pablo
Picasso invited a few friends to his Paris studio to see his ambitious new work
in progress, a large painting that would later be titled Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon. During the preceding winter, Picasso had filled one sketchbook after
another with preparatory drawings. William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York later calculated that Picasso had made 400 to 500 studies for
Demoiselles, "a quantity
of preparatory work," he
said, "without
parallel for a single picture, in the entire history of art."
Today, Demoiselles is recognized as the most
revolutionary painting of the 20th century and is reproduced in more textbooks than
any other work of art of the modern era. Its significance is a result of its
role as the first announcement of Cubism, which Picasso and his friend Georges
Braque developed in subsequent years, and which became the most influential movement
in the visual arts of the 20th century.
Picasso was a great conceptual innovator, who
emphasized the contrast between his method and that of Cézanne by declaring "I don’t seek; I find." Although he is responsible for a number
of other important innovations in his long career, which continued until his
death in 1973 at the age of 92, Picasso’s single greatest contribution was
Cubism – an innovation based not on vision, but on thought. In the words of the
art historian John Golding, the Cubist works of Picasso and Braque "are not so much records of the sensory appearance
of their subjects as expressions in pictorial terms of their idea or knowledge
of them."
A young poet who was a friend of Picasso described
Demoiselles as the first "painting
equation," comparing
its stylized shapes to mathematical symbols. Picasso’s vast body of preliminary
studies was made not to capture the appearance of nude women, but to reduce them
progressively into collections of signs that symbolize elements of their forms
as viewed different vantage points.
TO BE CONTINUED
No comments :
Post a Comment