Are you a Picasso or a Cezanne? Or are you the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac?
Picasso (and the Eagles) burst on to the scene early in life with a distinctive style. Fleetwood Mac (and Cezanne) noodled around for ages before finding their creative feet. Rumours, Fleetwood Mac’s titanic hit, was released ten years after the band had formed. Cezanne hit his creative peak in his 60s.
Let’s back up a little. Where do these insights come from? The popular business writer Malcolm Gladwell likes to talk about the bands, but his inspiration is an unlikely source: an economist called David W Galenson, of the University of Chicago, who likes to count things.
Specifically, Galenson likes to count things that correlate with creative success. He recently demonstrated that Picasso was by far the greatest artist of the 20th century. His method is simplicity itself: roundup every art history textbook of the past 15 years and see whose art is reproduced most frequently. Picasso, with 395 illustrations in 33 textbooks, scores nearly as many as his three closest rivals (Matisse, Duchamp, and Mondrian) put together.
Galenson, I should say, drives art critics crazy. But he has a point. Counting appearances in textbooks is not a bad measure as each mention is a decision by an expert to give over costly space and ink to Picasso, rather than, say, Jackson Pollock. Galenson has also counted photographs in photography textbooks, architecture textbooks (Le Corbusier is top), and even ranked Nobel-prize-winning economists according to the citations they have received from other researchers.
What’s really fascinating, though, is that rather than simply creating a list of ‘the best’, Galenson has looked at when people produce their best work. He believes he can track two types of creativity: conceptual creativity, when the likes of Picasso (or TS Eliot, or Herman Melville) produce career-defining work in their 20s; and experimental creativity, when a Cezanne or a Mondrian (or indeed, a Lloyd Wright or a Virginia Woolf) will produce their best — that is, their most valued, viewed, read or talked-about —work after the age of 50.
We naturally associate creative brilliance with a degree of precocity: Mozart, Picasso, the Eagles… well, maybe not the Eagles, but you get the idea. But Galenson’s careful counting shows that there is another way to creative success. No matter how old you are, your best years may yet lie ahead of you.
Tim Harford, a Financial Times columnist, is author of Dear Undercover Economist.
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