Robert Jensen

This essay demonstrates how market prices for contemporary art flourished in the late nineteenth century, fell after 1900, and rose again in the 1960s. This discovery stands in contrast to previous twentieth-century art market studies, which have depended on the sales prices achieved by modernist and avant-garde artists. The artists who were financ...

Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters. By SpearRichard E. et al. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 384. $85.00, cloth.. - Volume 71 Issue 3 - Robert Jensen

The author applies David Galenson's work on the life cycles of modern artists to the study of the paintings of old masters, from about the early fifteenth to the late seventeenth centuries. Both the potential use of technical examination of paintings and the role of drawings for preconceiving compositions are explored as means for interpreting arti...

This paper reexamines the process by which a market for a new product modern painting emerged in Paris in the nineteenth century. Contrary to the accepted account, in which the monopoly of the official Salon was replaced by a competitive market operated by private dealers, we find that the Salon was in fact initially replaced by a series of smaller...

There have been two very different life cycles for great artists: some have made their greatest contributions very early in their careers, whereas others have produced their best work late in their lives. These two patterns have been associated with different working methods, as art's young geniuses have worked deductively to make conceptual innova...

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