Analyzing Artistic Innovation: The Greatest Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The economics of recombinant knowledge is a promising field of investigation. New technological systems emerge when strong cores of complementary knowledge consolidate and feed an array of coherent applications and implementations. However, diminishing returns to recombination eventually emerge, and the rates of growth of technological systems gradually decline. Empirical evidence based on analysis of the co-occurrence of technological classes within two or more patent applications, allows the identification and measurement of the dynamics of knowledge recombination. Our analysis focus on patent applications to the European Patent Office, in the period 1981-2003, and provides empirical evidence on the emergence of the new technological system based upon information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their wide scope of applications as the result of a process of knowledge recombination. The empirical investigation confirms that the recombination process has been more effective in countries characterized by higher levels of coherence and specialization of their knowledge space. Countries better able to master the recombinant generation of new technological knowledge have experienced higher rates of increase of national multifactor productivity growth.

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NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
ANALYZING ARTISTIC INNOVATION: THE GREATEST
BREAKTHROUGHS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
David W. Galenson
Working Paper 12185
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12185
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
April 2006
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Bureau of Economic Research.
©2006 by David W. Galenson. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may
be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source.

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Analyzing Artistic Innovation: The Greatest Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
David W. Galenson
NBER Working Paper No. 12185
April 2006
JEL No.
ABSTRACT
This paper considers not only when in their careers the greatest artists of the twentieth century made
their greatest discoveries, but also how quickly they made them. The results underscore the dominant
position of Picasso and Cubism in twentieth-century art: Picasso alone accounts for the two best
three-year periods produced by any artist, and he and Braque account for three of the best five-year
periods, all for the work the two young artists did in developing Cubism. Warhol’s innovations in
Pop art and Matisse’s development of Fauvism also rank among the century’s most important
breakthroughs. In general, identifying the most important short periods of artistic creativity
emphasizes the differing methods of conceptual and experimental artists: great conceptual
innovators, like Picasso, Matisse, and Warhol, made their greatest discoveries abruptly, whereas
great experimental innovators, like Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock, made their discoveries more
gradually. The finding that artists who innovate early in their lives do so suddenly, while those who
innovate late do so more gradually, adds an important dimension to our understanding of human
creativity.
David W. Galenson
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
and NBER
galenson@uchicago.edu

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Breakthroughs
[The artist] has to make an enormous effort to lift himself above
his contemporaries. This results in what we often call the
“breakthrough,” that every artist on the path to success has to
make.
Alan Bowness1
The true subject of art history is the narrative and analysis of the succession of
innovations that have changed the practices of artists over the course of time. This is a source of
considerable confusion not only among the public at large, but even among many art scholars, for
there is a persistent belief that art history is the story of the lives of great artists. However
widespread, this belief is mistaken. Artists’ contributions to their discipline do not consist of
their entire body of work, but rather only that part of it that embodies inventions that are
subsequently deemed valuable by other artists. The chief curator of painting and sculpture at New
York’s Museum of Modern Art, perhaps the world’s preeminent museum of twentieth-century
art, recently expressed this succinctly in explaining the mission of his institution: “MOMA is a
museum interested in telling the story of successive innovations rather than a museum interested
in the longevity of individual careers.”2 Scholarly surveys follow this same model, as for example
in the statement that opens the preface to their recent textbook, Art Since 1900, Hal Foster,
Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh declare not that their work is arranged
around the careers of artists, but rather that “This book is organized as a succession of important
events, each keyed to an appropriate date, and can thus be read as a chronological account of
twentieth-century art.”3
Although a vast body of scholarship has concentrated on the specific discoveries made by
great artists, art historians consistently treat each of these discoveries in isolation, and there has

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been remarkably little systematic comparative treatment of these events. This paper will begin to
remedy this neglect, by using the scholarly narratives of scores of art historians as the basis for
empirical analysis of the most important breakthroughs made by the greatest artists of the past
century in the course of following their paths to success. Performing this analysis can increase
our understanding of artistic creativity, at the same time that it deepens our insight into the nature
of the greatest artistic innovations of the twentieth century.
Data
There is, it seems, a graph of creativity which can be plotted
through an artist’s career.
Alan Bowness4
The data used in this study were drawn from all available textbooks of art history,
published in English since 1990, that survey the art of the twentieth century.5 From these 33
books, listings were made of all the illustrations of works by 19 artists: 15 of these artists were
identified by an earlier study as the most important artists of the twentieth century, while the
remaining four were identified by a second study as having executed individual works that
ranked among the most important of the twentieth century.6 The full sample of these 19 artists is
shown in Table 1.
The data set constructed in this way can be used to create a profile for each artist,
showing how many illustrations of his work the textbooks contain from each year of his career.
Since the illustrations were chosen by the books’ authors to show readers the most important
developments in advanced art, the individual years, or periods of years, from which the most
illustrations of an artist’s work are reproduced can be presumed to identify the most important
portions of the artist’s career.7

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These profiles furthermore reveal not only at what stage of his career an artist made his
greatest contribution, but also how suddenly and how quickly he made them. And comparisons
across artists of the numbers of illustrations of their work from specified periods of time can
allow us to judge which artists’ breakthroughs were most important, in the judgment of art
historians. With this recognition, we can examine the evidence.
Durations
Many artists do their best work in a relatively short period.
Alan Bowness8
Table 2 ranks the best individual years of all the artists in the sample for this study. This
ranking is not restricted to each artist’s best year, so some artists appear more than once, while
some artists do not appear at all.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Table 2 is the dominant position of Picasso. Not only
does he rank in first place for his work of 1907, with nearly a third more illustrations than the
second-place entry, but in all he has no less than four individual years that rank among the
greatest 15 of the century. Even more remarkably, three of these years rank among the top five
overall.
It is no surprise that Picasso’s work of 1907 ranks as the greatest one-year achievement of
the twentieth century, for that was the year he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which ranks as
the century’s most important individual work of art.9 The privileged place of that painting, and of
Picasso’s work of that year, are a consequence of the fact that this announced the beginning of
the Cubist revolution, which would become by far the most influential development of the
century in the visual arts. Experimental artists develop their contributions gradually, and later