Measuring Masters and Masterpieces

Abstract

In 1962, art historian George Kubler remarked that « the modern professional humanist is an academic person who pretends to despise measurement because of its 'scientific' nature, » and although the passage of four decades has now produced exceptions to Kubler's generalization in some disciplines within the humanities, art history is not prominent among them 1 . In 1998, for example, curator Robert Storr of New York's Museum of Modern Art could declare that an artist's success « is completely unquantifiable » 2 . Yet Storr's belief is mistaken. As in other disciplines, quantitative evidence in art history has proven useful not only for constructing explanations, but for identifying problems to be explained. One recent study, for example, not only quantified artistic success, but helped to reveal an underlying structure of the creative process that deepens our understanding of the achievements of individual painters. The present paper extends this investigation, testing its conclusions by extending its analysis to a new body of data.The earlier study used a quantitative analysis of the illustrations contained in published surveys of modern art to produce measurements of art historians' own judgments of the relative importance of modern French painters, and paintings 3 . That study drew its Measuring Masters and Masterpieces Histoire & mesure, XVII -1/2 | 2002