Will You Still Be Creative, When You're 64?

For the artistic types, the answer depends on how good you are at turning experience into wisdom.

Art-onomics guru David Galenson has spent the past five years arguing that there are two types of artists:

- conceptual ones who tend to work off of a few bold theories and tend to make their greatest contributions early on in life (e.g. Pablo Picasso and Orson Welles - for Picasso check out some of his late works for proof, and for Welles I recommend this)

- experimental ones who tinker around with their work until they get it just right. These guys usually create their most significant works later in life.

In his new working paper, Galenson tries to dig a bit deeper and find out why some experimental artists putter out earlier than others -- what stops the artistic inquiry?

He takes a look at five Impressionist painters: Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The quintet were ideal in that they were all born within 11 years of each other and all lived past the age of 65. Galenson tracks how many significant works each artist created through each decade in his life. (The yardstick here is any work that's mentioned at least once in art history textbooks published since 1970.)

This table from the paper portends to show that Degas, Renoir and Pissarro all flamed out after their 50's while Cezanne and Monet kept making a large number of significant pieces:

So what's the reason?

Galenson argues that since experimental artists often wind up in a life-long search for perfection, there are a lot more chances to get derailed when that perfection starts to seem more and more elusive.

What made Monet and Cezanne different was that both

"used their dissatisfaction as a constant spur motivating them to improve their art, but both also recognized their progress. Their self-critical ability allowed them to separate successful experiments from failures, and this enabled both to make their trial-and-error methods the basis of an improvement in their art over time. This improvement might be painstaking and slow, but both understood that over long periods its cumulative effect could be very great."

That seems to make sense, but it's hard to completely embrace the conclusion when the sample size is a whopping five.

More on Galenson:
The intellectual's Thomas Friedman, a.k.a. Malcolm Gladwell, is planning a book based on Galenson's research.
What Kind of Genius Are You? (Wired)
Interview With Galenson (Smithsonian Magazine)