Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Cycles of Artistic Creativity
University of Chicago economics professor David Galenson thinks he can shed light on these questions and more. In his new book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, he presents hard evidence for the long-held notion that creative people come in two basic types. No, not crude versus subtle or traditional versus innovative. Rather “young geniuses,” who draw mainly on ideas, and “old masters,” who draw mainly on experience. T.S. Eliot, who was studying philosophy at Harvard when he wrote the allusion-packed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is a prototypical young genius. William Carlos Williams, the practicing physician who wrote “No ideas but in things” and thought Eliot’s work barely qualified as poetry, is a classic old master.
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By quantifying artists’ reputations Galenson risks offending purists, but he isn’t trying to devalue or debunk the act of creation. He just wants to show that it can be studied by counting–provided that you count the right things. A busy economics major in college, he took a modern-art survey course for a break, which got him wondering: why do museums usually give pride of place to the youthful work of some artists and the later work of others? He went on to publish articles and books, including Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America, but in 1997 he returned to his question about artists. Soon he was deep into finding numerical ways to roughly approximate the consensus of informed opinion–not his own–on artists in different fields (though he’s done more research on painters than others). He compared the auction prices for early and late works of prominent modern painters. He tallied the number of times their names came up in textbooks. He listed works top curators chose to display. He noted which poems were most often anthologized. And so on.
Artists in the second group, old masters, usually do their best work late. They’re as tentative as the young geniuses are dogmatic. They worry endlessly that they might be on the wrong track or that they’ll die before they get wherever they’re going. They’re rarely sure what they’re going to do or when a particular piece is finished, sometimes painting over their own work or returning to a published book to rewrite parts of it. They find their way by constantly revising. “In order to be successful,” wrote Paul Klee in 1909, “it is necessary never to work toward a conception of the picture completely thought out in advance.” Having someone else execute their work would be like hiring an assistant to chew their food. Over their typically long careers it’s hard to single out one masterpiece. Think Monet, Frost, Dickens, Hitchcock.
