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.
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Paul Cézanne (Self Portrait,
about 1880) and Orson Welles
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By David Galenson
Poets
In a letter written at the age of 40, Robert Frost recalled, "I was under 20 when I deliberately put it
to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we
actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near." This set Frost on his artistic course, as
throughout his career he made poems from common language. "I would never use a word or combination of
words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech," he said. The most celebrated of these poems were about the people of
rural New England. The poet Randall Jarrell wrote of Frost that "no other poet has written so well about
the actions of ordinary men,” and observed that in Frost’s poems there were
“real people with their real speech and real thought and real emotions."
Frost plainly fits the category of
experimenter: his greatest poems were a product of long and careful
observation. Like many other experimental artists, he believed the most lasting
works of art were those that were not planned, but discovered in the act of
execution – "no
surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."
Frost’s art matured slowly. He wrote his most
frequently anthologized poem, "Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening," at
the age of 48. At the end of that poem, Frost quietly emphasized the narrator’s
determination to continue to struggle against the adversity in his life – not
by resorting to abstract or lofty rhetoric, but by repeating the simple statement
of his immediate goal:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
While Frost wrote this poem at the kitchen
table of his New Hampshire farm, T.S.
Eliot composed his most frequently anthologized poem – the single most
anthologized American poem of the 20th century – in the library at Harvard, where
he was a graduate student in philosophy. He wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at the age of just 23. Eleven years
later, Eliot wrote his famous long poem "The Waste Land," which
was recently voted by a panel of leading poets the best American poem of the
20th century.
Eliot was a conceptual artist. The people
in his poems are imaginary, and their speech is more often drawn from the
language of earlier poets than from the vernacular. The critic Edmund Wilson
observed that in the 403 lines of "The
Waste Land," Eliot
"manages to include quotations from,
allusions to or imitation of at least 35 different writers" as well as "to introduce passages in six foreign languages." The poem consistently and confusingly juxtaposed
allusions to the familiar and the unfamiliar, as, for example, in this short passage:
London Bridge is falling down falling
down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affi na
Quando fi am ceu chelidon –
O swallow
Swallow
Eliot’s complex early work had an enormous
impact. William Carlos Williams later summarized it by observing that "The Waste Land" "wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it." The experimentalist Williams, who had
hoped to lead American poets toward a more realistic art grounded in
observation, deplored the influence of the preeminent conceptualist poet: "Eliot returned us to the classroom just
when we were on the point of escape."
Novelists
Like Frost, Mark Twain based his writing on the speech of ordinary people.
Twain was so proud of his ability to capture distinct local dialects that he
inserted a prefatory note in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that firmly alerted
the reader to his skill: "The
shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but
painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal
familiarity with these several forms of speech."
Also, like Frost, Twain did not plan his
works in advance, but discovered the plots of his novels as he wrote. In many cases,
he put aside or abandoned novels in progress when he could not see how to
continue their stories. Twain worked on Huckleberry Finn over nine years,
completing the writing over three separate periods. Even then, the experimental
Twain apparently did not consider the book finished. As one scholar recently
observed, "Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn has no definite article in its title, though one is usually
put there." He
added: "Huck
ends his book with anticipations (never fulfilled) of further goings-on in the
West. For this reason, very likely, Twain hesitated to call the job he had done
definitive."
Twain’s art developed gradually, as his
prose grew in power and his understanding of American society in the late 19th
century grew deeper. He completed Huckleberry Finn, which scholars consider his
greatest work, at the age of 50. The novelist Ralph Ellison is among those who stress
the moral content of the book: "Huckleberry
Finn projected the truth about slavery," a subject Twain had avoided nine years earlier in Tom Sawyer.
Unlike Twain, who did not even attempt to write
a novel until he had passed the age of 35, the conceptualist F. Scott
Fitzgerald was famously precocious. At 24, he published a bestseller (This Side
of Paradise) that H.L. Mencken hailed as "a truly amazing first novel –original in structure, extremely
sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is ... rare in
American writing." Five
years later, when he completed The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote to his
editor, "I
think my novel is about the best American novel ever written."
Many scholars have since agreed with Fitzgerald’s
judgment, and the central problem in Fitzgerald scholarship has consequently been
why his work later deteriorated. What literary scholars have failed to
appreciate is that the same pattern applies to many other conceptual artists,
including Fitzgerald’s friend Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s success in Gatsby
came from clarity and simplicity: the book’s lyrical prose, simplified
characters and symbolic settings all powerfully serve its allegorical plot. As
Fitzgerald grew older, he set out to make a more complex art, and his work
consequently lost the elegance, simplicity and impact of his early novels.
Movie Directors
When the American Film Institute
established its Life Achievement Award in 1973, the first honoree was John Ford. Interestingly, the written tribute
did not name any specific movie, but referred to his films as "a creative tapestry representing over 50
years of work." In a
poll of film critics by Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s journal,
The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were voted Ford’s best
movies. He directed these at the ages of 62 and 68, respectively. The facts
that Ford was a great director who did not make any single trademark work and
that he made great movies late in his life mark his experimental approach to
his art.
Ford’s films are consistently praised for
their visual qualities. Elia Kazan declared that Ford "taught me to tell it in pictures." Ford believed firmly in the primacy of
images in movies, stating that "pictures,
not words, should tell the story." Like
other experimental artists, Ford put substance over form, and wanted his movies
to achieve immediacy and realism: "I try
to make people forget they’re in a theater. I don’t want them to be conscious
of a camera or a screen. I want them to feel what they’re seeing is real." His technique developed gradually, so
that the critic Andrew Sarris judged that "the last two decades of his career were his richest and most rewarding."
Orson
Welles received the AFI’s third Life Achievement Award. The AFI’s tribute
mentioned only one film, Citizen Kane, which it described as "a benchmark in world cinema, an
achievement against which all other films are still measured." There is remarkable agreement that
Citizen Kane is the most important movie ever made. To cite just one of many possible
indicators, it has placed first in all five international decennial polls that
Sight and Sound has conducted of film critics since 1962. Among the most
celebrated facts about Citizen Kane is that Welles directed, was the co-author
and played the title role at the tender age of 26. And it was his first film.
Citizen Kane was a conceptual masterpiece made
by a precocious genius. Its many technical innovations in sight and sound
included a number of devices that Welles adapted from his earlier work in radio
and on the stage.
But in spite of the influence of its
specific technological innovations, Welles’s greatest achievement in Citizen
Kane may have been synthetic, as he created symbolic linkages between the many
technical devices and the film’s story. Thus, the technical means by which he
punctuated the narrative reinforced the varied and often contradictory views of
Kane presented by different characters. The writer Jorge Luis Borges recognized
this, observing that Kane’s subject is "the discovery of the secret soul of a man." He added, "In
astonishing and endlessly varied ways, Orson Welles exhibits the fragments of
the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine and
reconstruct them."
Although Welles went on to make other acclaimed movies, Citizen Kane was by far
the most important. In Andrew Sarris’s words, "The conventional American diagnosis of his career is decline, pure and
simple."
Creativity Rethought
The eight artists discussed here can do no
more than illustrate the two life cycles of creativity, and the association of
each with a specific set of goals and working methods. But the same patterns
extend to several hundred modern painters, poets, novelists and movie directors
whose careers I have studied in detail.
Nor are the two life cycles of creativity
restricted to the modern era. The art historian Robert Jensen has found that
the painters Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian and Rembrandt were experimental old
masters, whereas Masaccio, Raphael, Caravaggio and Vermeer were conceptual
young geniuses.
I believe that the existence of differing
life cycles for experimental and conceptual innovators is not restricted to the
arts, but is general to all intellectual activities. Although much empirical
work remains to be done, the Ohio State University economist Bruce Weinberg and
I have found that the greatest contributions of conceptual Nobel laureates in
economics, including Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson, have occurred at much
younger ages than the greatest contributions of such experimental laureates as
Simon Kuznets and Theodore Schultz.
The practical importance of this challenge
to the research of the psychologists may be substantial. Contrary to the
psychologists, who believe that the life cycle of creativity is determined by
the intellectual domain or activity, my work suggests that it is the
characteristics of the individual that determine the shape of the creative life
cycle. This implies that our opportunities for creativity are not dictated by
our professions, but are determined by our own choices and abilities.
Understanding our strengths, and those of others, could help increase both our
own creative potential and that of our society.
CONCLUDED
David Galenson teaches economics at University of Chicago. The
author expands on the ideas presented here in his book, Old Masters and Young
Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic
Creativity (Princeton
University Press).
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