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One-Hit Wonders: Why Some of the Most ImportantWork of Modern Art are not by Important ArtistsDavid W. Galenson aa University of Chicago National Bureau of Economic ResearchPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

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Abstract. How can minor artists produce major works of art? Theauthor considers 13 modern visual artists, each of whom produceda single masterpiece that dominates the artist’s career. The artistsinclude painters, sculptors, and architects, and their masterpiecesinclude works as prominent as the painting American Gothic, theCentre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Vietnam VeteransMemorial in Washington, DC. In each case, these isolatedachievements were the products of innovative ideas that the artistsformulated early in their careers and fully embodied in individualworks. The phenomenon of the artistic one-hit wonder highlightsthe nature of conceptual innovation, in which radical newapproaches based on new ideas are introduced suddenly by youngpractitioners.

Keywords: conceptual innovation, Maya Lin, Renzo Piano,Vladimir Tatlin

he history of popular music is haunted by the ghostsof scores of singers and groups who made a singlehit song and were never heard from again. Periodi-

cally, radio stations that specialize in classic rock willdevote a weekend to those one-hit wonders, and once againwe hear the Penguins singing “Earth Angel,” the TeddyBears singing “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” Doris Troysinging “Just One Look,” and a host of other nostalgicselections from this curious set of isolated achievements.

Yet well over a century before the Murmaids recorded“Popsicles, icicles,” the phenomenon of the one-hit wonderhad appeared in dramatic form in the visual arts. Lookingback over the modern era, we can in fact see a series ofartists, each of whom produced a single landmark work thatdominated his or her career. Although each case is eminent-ly familiar to art historians, humanists are loath to under-take studies that involve systematic generalization, and con-sequently the one-hit wonders of modern art have neverbeen analyzed as a class. Here, I will examine 13 instancesin which a single major work was produced by an otherwiseminor artist. Even a brief survey of the characteristics ofthese works and their makers is sufficient to establish thatthey share a strong common basis. Furthermore, under-

standing this common basis produces a general conclusionabout the causes of one-hit wonders that appears to haveimplications for a range of intellectual activities extendingfar beyond modern art.

Measurement

A one-hit wonder occurs when an important work of artis created by an otherwise unimportant artist. It will be valu-able to study this phenomenon only if it can be identifiedwith confidence, and to do so it is necessary to be able tomeasure importance in art in a reasonable and objectiveway. Most art historians would deny that this is possible, butthey are mistaken in this belief. As the critic ClementGreenberg (1993, 118) observed years ago, quality in art isnot simply a matter of individual taste, but rather, “There isa consensus of taste. The best taste is that of the peoplewho, in each generation, spend the most time and trouble onart, and this best taste has always turned out to be unani-mous, within certain limits.” This study will base its mea-surements of importance on a systematic survey of the judg-ments of a group of experts whom Greenberg had in mind.Throughout the study, the importance both of artists and ofindividual works of art will be determined by the amount ofattention they receive in art historians’ narratives of the his-tory of the modern era. In practice, the notice paid will bemeasured by the frequency with which reproductions ofparticular works of art appear as illustrations in publishedsurveys of the history of modern art.

Three quantitative criteria will be used to identify one-hitwonders. First, to be of interest, the hit in question must bea big one. In practice, the requirement will be that the hitmust be illustrated more often than any single work bymuch more important artists of the same period (with theartists’ importance measured by the total number of illus-trations of all the works of each). Second, the artist whomade the single great hit obviously must not have had anyother hits. In quantitative terms, the hit must have many

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One-Hit WondersWhy Some of the Most Important Works of Modern Art Are Not by Important Artists

DAVID W. GALENSONUniversity of Chicago

National Bureau of Economic Research

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more illustrations than any other work by the artist. And,although less central to the definition of the phenomenon, athird criterion will involve the drama of the single hit. Themost startling one-hit wonders will be those artists who didnot produce a large body of work judged worthy of noticeby scholars, even if no other one clearly stood out: the moststriking one-hit wonders will be those whose careers aredominated by the single hit. In practice, the hit will berequired to account for at least half the total number of illus-trations of the artist’s work.

Masters and Masterpieces

Earlier research has shown that the greatest individualworks of art, as defined here by the probability of appear-ance in surveys of art history, are typically made by con-ceptual artists. The innovations of conceptual artists are theproduct of new ideas, and because these can arrive sudden-ly and completely, they are often discretely embodied inindividual works that stand thereafter as the first and conse-quently most important expression of the particular newidea. In contrast, the innovations of experimental artistsinvolve new ways of representing perceptions, and arearrived at only gradually and slowly, typically embodiedpiecemeal in larger bodies of work. Consequently, no singlework is the obvious and complete demonstration of theinnovation. This analysis has explained why great experi-mental artists—Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Renoir—failed toproduce individual paintings that art historians’ textbooksreveal to be as important as specific paintings by great con-ceptual artists—Picasso, Manet, Seurat, Duchamp (see, forexample, Galenson 2002a, b).

The same research may explain the phenomenon of theone-hit wonder. Specifically, a conceptual artist may pro-duce one new idea and never again make a significantinnovation. That single new idea may be completelyembodied in a specific work of art. If the idea is an impor-tant one, the work that announces it may become animportant part of the narrative of art history, and that sin-gle work will dominate the artist’s career from the vantagepoint of the textbooks.

If this analysis is correct, and one-hit wonders are typi-cally conceptual artists, earlier research on artists’ lifecycles suggests another prediction concerning the timing ofthe single hits within the careers of those who created them.Specifically, the hits should occur early in those careers.Because important conceptual innovations depend on radi-cal new approaches, and typically on extreme simplifica-tions, they tend to occur before an artist has become accus-tomed to using the established rules of his discipline andbefore he has become immersed in the details and com-plexity of that discipline (see, for example, Galenson2004b). If one-hit wonders are in fact conceptual artists,their single great innovations should therefore tend to occurearly in their careers.

Théodore Géricault

Tables 1 and 2 are based on a search of 27 textbooks(published in English since 1970) to find all the illustrationsof the work of five Romantic painters of the early nine-teenth century. An obvious puzzle is posed by ThéodoreGéricault’s place in the two tables. Although he ranks onlyfourth among the artists in table 1 in overall importance,with fewer total number of illustrations of his work than J. A. D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, or J. M. W. Turner, Géri-cault’s painting of The Raft of the Medusa dominates table2, with twice as many illustrations as any single painting byIngres or Turner, and over 50 percent more than any paint-ing by Delacroix. When we compare tables 1 and 2, we seethat the Medusa accounts for half of Géricault’s total num-ber of illustrations. Medusa appears in 22 texts, whereas noother painting by Géricault appears in more than 4.

Géricault’s masterpiece was occasioned by a tragedy thathad become a political scandal. The frigate Medusa had runaground in 1816 off the west coast of Africa because of theincompetence of the royalist aristocrat who commanded theship. There weren’t enough lifeboats for all the passengers,and the captain chose to use the boats to save himself andthe ship’s senior officers, leaving 149 people adrift on animprovised raft. After an ordeal of 13 days, 15 survivorswere rescued by a search vessel. Two of the survivors pub-lished an account of the horrors of the voyage, involvingfamine, thirst, insanity, mutiny, and cannibalism. The ensu-ing public outrage prompted a number of changes in gov-ernment policies, including the removal of the minister ofthe marine (Rosenblum and Janson 1984, 120–21; Eisen-man 1994, 64–66; Crow 1995, 288–92).

102 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 1. Total Number of Illustrations of Paintingsby Five Romantic Artists

Artist No. of illustrations

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) 61

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) 58Joseph Mallord William Turner

(1775–1851) 47Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) 44Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835) 17

Source. Hamilton (1970); Cleaver (1972); Picon (1974); Ruskin(1974); Spencer (1975); Norman (1977); Cornell (1983); Britschand Britsch (1984); Rosenblum and Janson (1984); Sporre (1984);Feldman (1985); Hartt (1989); Wood, Cole, and Gealt (1989); de laCroix, Tansey, and Kirkpatrick (1991); Sprocatti (1992); Stricklandand Boswell (1992); Adams (1994); Eisenman (1994); Janson andJanson (1995); Stokstad (1995); Grieder (1996); Wilkins, Schultz,and Linduff (1997); Freeman (1998); Gebhardt (1998); Gilbert(1998); Honour and Fleming (1999); Kemp (2000).

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Géricault seized on this event as the basis for a majorwork. He immersed himself in the details of the voyage,befriending a number of the survivors, and interviewing anddrawing them. He had a model of the raft built in his studioin Paris and traveled to Le Havre to study the action ofocean waves. He visited hospitals and morgues to study theexpressions of the dying and the dead. From first sketch tocompletion of the final work, Géricault devoted 16 monthsto his masterpiece. He made hundreds of sketches anddrawings of a number of different episodes in the narrativebefore settling on the moment when the survivors firstsighted the rescue ship. At least 49 drawings and paintingsdirectly connected with The Raft of the Medusa survive,including a series of studies of individual figures, several oilsketches of the full composition, and the enormous finalpainting, which measures more than 375 square feet in size(Berger 1955, 17–18, 26, 79).

Kenneth Clark (1973) observed that the nature of thepainting evolved as Géricault planned it: “The compositiongrew more academic as it went on.” The image of the paint-ing ultimately owed more to the study of earlier art than todirect visual observation:

In the end it is this studio work, rather than the studies ofcorpses and hospital inmates, which is evident in the picture.To our eyes The Raft of the Medusa is a highly artificial per-formance made up of elements from Michelangelo, Cara-vaggio and Pierre Guérin, who had been Géricault’s master;the pointing figures even remind one of Raphael’s Transfig-uration. (ibid., 185)

The innovation of the Medusa lay in Géricault’s novel useof these traditional means. In the earlier practice ofFrench history painting, ideal forms and compositionswere used to celebrate the actions of classical militaryheroes. Géricault subverted this tradition by using insteadthese academic forms to give tragic status to helpless andunknown victims. In Walter Friedlaender’s (1952, 101–2)conclusion: “Géricault does not represent heroes, butheroism, the heroic endurance of the anonymous, suffer-ing at the hands of fate and their fellow men; he lendsthem a pathos and passion attained neither by his prede-

cessors nor by his contemporaries . . . Géricault’s Medusasplits wide open not merely the form of classicism, but itscontent and its feeling.”

Géricault exhibited the Medusa at the Salon of 1819. Hehad hoped that the enormous effort he had devoted to cele-brating this event as a catalyst for political reform would berewarded by an enthusiastic public reception and the pur-chase of the painting by the government, and when neitherof these occurred he became deeply depressed. In the nextfew years, his style and subject matter changed sharply ashe abandoned tragic motifs and grandiose treatments infavor of detailed observation of everyday reality. He neveragain carried out a project on a scale approaching that of theMedusa (Crow 1995, 194; Berger 1955, 55).

Géricault died prematurely, just five years after com-pleting the Medusa. Clark (1973, 177) concluded that “hecarried through one major work into which he put thewhole of himself.” Commenting on that one work,Thomas Crow stressed: “It is crucial to recognize that thepainting communicates its subject matter as an idea ratherthan anything resembling reportage” (Eisenman 1994,66). Géricault’s exhaustive preparations for an innovativemaster work that used images and forms taken from arthistory to make an ideological statement clearly identifyhim as a conceptual artist. That he executed his greatestwork at the age of 28 is also consistent with the pattern inwhich conceptual innovators typically produce theirmajor work early in their careers.

Antoine-Jean Gros

Tables 1 and 2 also identify a second one-hit wonder.Antoine-Jean Gros was an older artist whose work was amajor influence on Géricault. Although Gros’ work in totoreceived barely more than a third as many illustrations asthat of Turner, and just over a quarter as many as that ofIngres, his portrayal of Napoleon’s visit to the plague housein Jaffa was illustrated as many times in the books surveyedfor this study as any single painting by either of those muchgreater artists. That painting clearly dominates Gros’ career

TABLE 2. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Painting by Artists Listed in Table 1

No. of Artist Painting Date illustrations

Géricault The Raft of the Medusa 1819 22Delacroix The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 14Ingres Large Odalisque 1814 11Turner Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway 1844 11Gros Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa 1804 11

Source. See table 1.

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from the vantage point of the texts, for it accounts for near-ly two-thirds of the total number of illustrations of his workand is reproduced more than five times as frequently as anyother painting he made.

Gros idolized Napoleon. The consul had befriended thepainter as early as 1796, and Gros painted several largeworks that celebrated Napoleon’s heroism in battle. In1804, Napoleon commissioned Gros to make an importantpainting for purposes of public relations. In 1799, theFrench army had occupied the Palestinian city of Jaffaunder a negotiated surrender in which they agreed to sparethe lives of the Turkish soldiers stationed there. Napoleonhad promptly reneged on the agreement and executed morethan 2,500 Turkish soldiers. When the French army in Jaffawas then struck by the bubonic plague, Napoleon orderedhis surgeon to poison the ailing French soldiers instead oftaking them along on the army’s retreat to Cairo. The sur-geon refused, and a few soldiers who survived the plaguewere captured by the English troops who arrived in Jaffa.Their accounts of the French atrocities in the city werewidely publicized by the English press (Porterfield 1998,47–55).

Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa was commissionedin response to this damaging publicity. The painting com-memorated a visit the general had made to the plague hospi-tal on March 11, 1799. Gros systematically deviated fromeyewitness accounts of the episode in an obvious mythmak-ing effort. He portrayed Napoleon fearlessly touching the soreof a plague victim, implying not only that the general wasimmune to disease but also that he had miraculous powers ofhealing, suggesting parallels with Christ as well as associat-ing Napoleon with the traditional divine touch of kings. In1804, these remarkable additions to Napoleon’s pedigreeserved to strengthen his qualifications for the imperial thronehe would soon claim. Gros heightened the visual drama of thescene by taking it out of the small hospital room where it hadactually occurred and placing it instead in an exotic NearEastern setting, in the courtyard of a mosque overlooked by awalled city. A French flag flying triumphantly over the cityreinforces the suggestion that the French had come to bringcivilization to the Holy Land (Porterfield 1998, 56–61;Rosenblum and Janson 1984, 70–71).

Gros’ painting of the plague house drew on the tradi-tions of French history painting to emphasize the impor-tance of the event in several ways. One was its greatsize—over 390 square feet. Another was its composition.Thomas Crow has pointed out that in arranging the figuresin the Plague House Gros directly appropriated the com-position of Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of HisSons (1789) by Jacques-Louis David, thus associating hisown painting with a famous work by the greatest painterof the previous generation, who had also been Gros’teacher. But Gros also innovated in departing from thesetraditions by using conventional forms and compositionsto celebrate a modern hero rather than one from classical

times. History painting was thus now used not to celebratepast heroes but to glorify a present one (Crow 1995, 244).

Gros later painted other tributes to Napoleon, and afterNapoleon’s fall the painter attached himself to the Bour-bons. But his work is generally considered to have deterio-rated badly after he executed the Plague House. Althoughhe was made a baron and became president of the govern-ment’s Academy of Fine Arts, Gros became dissatisfiedwith both his own work and that of the next generation ofFrench artists. Overshadowed first by Géricault and later byDelacroix, he ultimately committed suicide. Clark (1973,178) attributed Gros’ decline to the fall of Napoleon: “With-out a hero he was lost, and he never again painted a picturethat moves us.” Yet the loss of his hero may not have beenthe sole cause of Gros’ inability to match or surpass the suc-cess of Napoleon in the Plague House, whether during thedecade of Napoleon’s life that remained after 1804 or thetwo decades that remained to Gros after Napoleon’s fall.Gros’ skillful use of art history in producing his great sym-bolic work, including the direct use of a composition byDavid, identifies him as a conceptual artist. That his great-est contribution was completed by the age of 33, when heshowed his masterpiece at the Salon of 1804, suggests thathis career was typical of conceptual innovators, whose bestnew ideas generally arrive early in their careers.

Gustave Caillebotte

Table 3 is based on a survey of 36 textbooks published dur-ing the past four decades in English, French, German, andItalian.1 Gustave Caillebotte’s work is illustrated overall onlyone-eighth as often as that of Paul Cézanne, less than one-sixth as often as that of Edgar Degas, and less than one-quarter as often as that of Auguste Renoir. Table 4, however,shows that Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Weather appearsin 11 of the books, or more than any individual work byCézanne, Degas, or Renoir. Rainy Weather accounts for morethan 60 percent of the total number of reproductions of Caille-botte’s works in the books and appears in more than threetimes as many books as any of his other paintings.

Gustave Caillebotte inherited a considerable fortune, andhe used his wealth to become one of the first patrons of the

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TABLE 3. Total Number of Illustrations of Works byFour Late-Nineteenth-Century Painters

Artist No. of illustrations

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) 144Edgar Degas (1834–1917) 114Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) 78Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) 18

Source. Jensen (2004, table 2).

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Impressionists. The paintings by Degas, Manet, Cézanne,Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro that he bequeathed to theFrench state form the core of the Musée D’Orsay’s presentcollection of these painters.2 But Caillebotte was also apainter, and he exhibited his work in five of the Impressionistgroup shows held during 1876–1882; Rainy Weatherappeared in the third group show in 1877.

Caillebotte’s friendship with the Impressionists, and hisparticipation in their exhibitions, might appear to signal thathe violates the prediction made earlier, that one-hit wondersshould be conceptual artists, for Impressionism was quintes-sentially an experimental movement. The group was led byMonet, who devoted his career to an effort to capture the visu-al appearance of nature, with its constantly changing effectsof light and atmosphere; he believed that this could only bedone by working outdoors in front of the motif, paintingdirectly on the canvas, without preparatory studies. Monetand his Impressionist colleagues established the forms oftheir paintings as they worked, making frequent changes astheir motif, or their perception of it, changed over time(Galenson 2004a). That Caillebotte’s paintings did not fit thisImpressionist model in either appearance or practice, howev-er, was commented on as early as 1877, when an anonymouscritic remarked that “Monsieur Caillebotte is an Impression-ist in name only. He knows how to draw and paints more seri-ously than his colleagues” (Varnedoe 1987, 188).

According to Kirk Varnedoe and Peter Galassi, Caille-botte often began his meticulous preparations for his paint-ings by tracing the major contours of the motif from a cam-era image—either from a photograph or from an image ona camera’s ground glass—then using these lines as the basisfor construction of a complete perspective drawing, madewith the aid of a straight-edge and mathematical calcula-tions (Varnedoe 1987, chaps. 3–4). Caillebotte made at least19 preparatory works for Rainy Weather, including 3 per-spective studies, 3 oil studies, and a full compositional oilsketch. Interestingly, Varnedoe recognized not only thatCaillebotte’s practice contrasted sharply with the experi-mental approach of the Impressionists, but also that itresembled that of the conceptual painter Georges Seurat.Thus, Varnedoe (1987, 88–95) commented on Rainy Weath-er: “Its scale, method, and structure stand outside theImpressionism of the 1870s and relate more closely to the

principles of Neo-Impressionism. Indeed, the relationbetween the Temps de pluie [Rainy Weather] and GeorgesSeurat’s Un Dimanche après-midi sur l’île de la GrandeJatte seems quite striking.”

Had Varnedoe been interested in artists’ life cycles, hemight have noticed an additional similarity between theseworks, for both were made by young artists: Seurat complet-ed the Grande Jatte at 27, and Caillebotte executed RainyWeather at 29. Caillebotte’s innovation was not nearly asgreat as that of Seurat, and Rainy Weather is a much lessimportant work than the Grande Jatte. Yet, in Rainy Weather,Caillebotte used the newly renovated neighborhood where hehad grown up to make a subtle but powerful statement aboutthe isolation of the residents of the modern city as theywalked through its great empty spaces. The conceptual disci-pline of the process Caillebotte followed in making the paint-ing is reflected in its precisely structured shapes, for insteadof the boisterous and bustling Parisian streets that appear inthe Impressionist paintings of Monet and Pissarro, RainyWeather offers a more disturbing representation of the alien-ation of the residents of the modern city.

Paul Sérusier

Tables 5 and 6 are based on a survey of 31 textbooks pub-lished in French since 1963. Table 5 shows that these bookscontain 14 illustrations of paintings by Paul Sérusier, or lessthan one-fifth as many as they contain of the work of fourgreat artists of the late nineteenth century who are also list-

TABLE 4. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Work by Artists Listed in Table 3

Artist Work Date No. of illustrations

Caillebotte Paris Street; Rainy Weather 1877 11Cézanne Large Bathers 1906 10Degas Little Dancer of Fourteen 1881 10Renoir The Boating Party 1881 10

Source. Jensen (2004, table 3).

TABLE 5. Total Number of Illustrations of Paintingsby Five Late-Nineteenth-Century Artists

Artist No. of illustrations

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) 120Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) 101Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) 75Edgar Degas (1834–1917) 74Paul Sérusier (1863–1927) 14

Source. Galenson (2002a, 83–85).

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ed in the table. Remarkably, however, table 6 shows thatSérusier’s The Talisman appears in these books more oftenthan any single painting by Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh,Renoir, or Degas. The Talisman accounts for nearly 80 per-cent of all the illustrations of Sérusier’s paintings, and it isillustrated more than three times as often as the only otherpainting by Sérusier that appears in the books.

Late in the summer of 1888 in the Breton artists’ colonyof Pont Aven, the 25-year-old art student Paul Sérusierintroduced himself to Paul Gauguin, who was generally rec-ognized as the leading Symbolist painter. Sérusier thenspent a morning painting with the older artist at the edge ofa small forest. Gauguin told Sérusier not to hesitate to usepure colors to express the intensity of his feelings for thelandscape: “‘How do you see this tree,’ Gauguin had said . . . ‘Is it really green? Use green then, the most beautifulgreen on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don’tbe afraid to paint it as blue as possible’” (Chipp 1968, 101).

Upon Sérusier’s return to Paris, the small painting of LeBois d’Amour that he had made under Gauguin’s supervisionexcited a group of his fellow students, including Pierre Bon-nard, Maurice Denis, and Edouard Vuillard. The studentsrenamed Sérusier’s little landscape The Talisman in recogni-tion of its inspiration for their art, gave themselves the collec-tive name of the Nabis, from the Hebrew word for “prophet,”and began to hold meetings at which they discussed Gau-guin’s ideas and the Symbolist movement in art.

Denis later recalled that “the extremely philosophical intel-lect of Sérusier very quickly transformed the least words ofGauguin into a scientific doctrine, which made a decisiveimpact on us” (Chipp 1968, 102). The Talisman was moreabstract and less carefully planned than Gauguin’s paintings,yet it clearly illustrated Gauguin’s message that the artistshould not merely record what he saw but should express hisfeelings by exaggerating his perceptions. The simplicity ofThe Talisman appears also to have led to Sérusier’s develop-ment of the doctrine that the new Symbolist art should privi-lege naiveté and sincerity over craftsmanship, and the beliefthat the expression of the artist’s feelings could be heightenedby cruder renderings of the subject, as clumsy executionrevealed an emotional truth that was hidden by more polishedtechnique (Mauner 1967, 5, 31).

The meetings of the Nabis led not only to changes in thestyles of the young painters but also to one of the most far-reaching theoretical statements in the history of art. In 1890,Denis, who was then 20 years old, published under a pseu-donym an article that began with the declaration: “It is wellto remember that a picture—before being a battle horse, anude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane sur-face covered with colors assembled in a certain order”(Chipp 1968, 94). Although Denis was not advocatingabstraction in art—he stated that a painting is an arrange-ment of colors before it is a motif, not instead of a motif—his formulation was a critical starting point for the doctrinethat would develop in the course of the twentieth centurythat a painting could in fact legitimately be an arrangementof colors without any explicit subject (Mauner 1967, 38).Three years later, on the occasion of Gauguin’s death, Denisexplained that the concept of the painting as a plane surfacehad been introduced to him and his fellow students for thefirst time by The Talisman, which had taught them clearly“that every work of art was a transposition, a caricature, thepassionate equivalent of a sensation received” (Chipp 1968,101). The opening declaration of Denis’ 1890 article hasbecome famous in art history, but another prophetic state-ment appeared later in the same article: “‘Be sincere: it issufficient to be sincere to paint well. Be naive. Make crude-ly that which one sees’” (Chipp 1968, 97; Denis 1920, 4).This statement foreshadowed innumerable debates of thefollowing century, in the course of which a progressiveabandonment of skillful execution in favor of naive or crudetechnique would lead to bitter arguments over the purposesof art and even over whether particular works could be con-sidered art. Although Denis did not explain why this state-ment was given within quotation marks, it is possible thatthis was his acknowledgment that its formulation was alsodue initially to Sérusier.

The Talisman was the work of just a few hours, and itmeasured less than 90 square inches in size. But in theNabis it gave rise to one of the leading movements ofadvanced art of the 1890s, and through Denis’ article it ledto the development of a revolutionary doctrine of theautonomy of the work of art. The fame of The Talisman,and the lack of the artist’s fame, are direct consequences

106 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 6. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Painting by Artists Listed in Table 5

Artist Painting Date No. of illustrations

Sérusier Le Bois d’Amour (The Talisman) 1888 11Cézanne Large Bathers 1906 9Renoir Le Moulin de la Galette 1876 9van Gogh Père Tanguy 1887 7Degas L’Absinthe 1876 5

Source. See table 5.

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of the conceptual nature of the painting: The Talismancommunicated Gauguin’s novel conceptual aesthetic toDenis and the other Nabis, and Sérusier was the messen-ger who recorded and transmitted the revelation. AlthoughSérusier subsequently devoted himself to developing thenew Symbolist aesthetic, his role was perceived as elabo-rating and clarifying a doctrine that had originated withGauguin (Denis 1920, 147). Sérusier’s failure to makeother paintings that most art historians consider worthy ofnotice in his nearly 40 remaining years after producingThe Talisman at 25 testifies to his subsequent failure toproduce other new ideas comparable in importance tothose he had expressed in that painting.

Vladimir Tatlin

Tables 7 and 8 are based on surveys of 25 textbookspublished in English since 1980. The leading sculptorslisted in table 7—Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi,Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore—are among themost important sculptors of the modern era. VladimirTatlin’s 19 illustrations represent less than a third as manyas those of works by Rodin, less than half as many asthose of works by Brancusi and Giacometti, and not muchmore than half as many as those of works by Moore.Remarkably, however, table 8 shows that Tatlin’s Monu-ment to the Third International is illustrated more oftenthan any sculpture by Rodin, the greatest modern sculptor,and more than twice as often as any sculpture by Bran-cusi, Giacometti, or Moore. The Monument accounts fornearly 80 percent of all the illustrations of Tatlin’s work,appearing in three times as many textbooks as his nextmost frequently reproduced work.

Vladimir Tatlin was a young Russian sculptor whoseartistic goals were fundamentally changed by the Revolu-tion. He became a leader of the new Constructivist move-ment, which was dedicated to the belief that art must have asocial purpose: artists should join engineers and scientistsin creating new forms, using new materials, that would beappropriate for new social organizations. In 1919, the Sovi-et government commissioned Tatlin to design a monumentfor the Third International, which Lenin had recently found-ed to promote global revolution. Tatlin responded by creat-ing a model of a tower. It is this model, and the reconstruc-tions of it that were made after the original was lost, that areillustrated in the textbooks surveyed.3

Tatlin’s Monument was actually designed as a building tohouse the Third International. Its intended height of 1,300feet would have made it the tallest structure in the world.Tatlin’s conceptual approach to art was reflected in themany layers of symbolism embodied in his plan (Milner1983, chap. 8). The tower appeared to lean forward, befit-ting a progressive new form of government. The spiralshapes incorporated into the design symbolized rising aspi-rations and triumph; the intertwining of two spirals repre-

sented the process of dialectical argument and its resolu-tion. Unlike earlier, static governments, which were housedin heavy, immobile structures, the thought was that thedynamic new communist government should have a mobileand active architecture, so the Monument was supposed tomove. The lowest level of the tower, where the congressesof the International were to meet, would rotate completelyon its axis once in the course of a year; the second level,which was to house the International’s administrativeoffices, would revolve once a month; and the highest, thirdlevel, which was to house the information offices of theInternational, would revolve daily. The diminishing size ofthe higher floors reflected the progression of power, upfrom the large hall of the assembly to the smaller and moreauthoritative bodies at higher levels.

Tatlin was neither an architect nor an engineer, and hisdesign for the tower was highly impractical. As John Milner(1983, 170) observed, “It was the idea and not the mecha-nistic realities which were his prime concern: as engineer-ing, the tower is utopian.” The tower, which was to straddlethe Neva River in Petrograd, was never built. Yet, early on,photographs of the model were widely reproduced in pam-phlets and books, for the design’s embodiment of the ideathat advanced art could serve the purposes of modern soci-ety. This was, of course, strictly an idea, for as RobertHughes (1982, 92) observed, the Monument “remains themost influential non-existent object of the twentieth centu-ry, and one of the most paradoxical—an unworkable, prob-ably unbuildable metaphor of practicality.”

Tatlin subsequently pursued the logic of Constructivism ina variety of other activities, including the design of costumesand sets for theatrical productions, as well as the design oftextiles and ceramics. He devoted several years to an attemptto design a flying machine that would allow individuals toglide: like all his works, it was intended for everyday use by

TABLE 7. Total Number of Illustrations of Works bySix Modern Sculptors

Sculptor No. of illustrations

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) 65Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) 51Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) 39Henry Moore (1898–1986) 34Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1956) 19Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) 7

Source. Hughes (1982); Cornell (1983); Britsch and Britsch(1984); Sporre (1984); Feldman (1985); Arnason and Wheeler(1986); Honour and Fleming (1986); Hartt (1989); Wood, Cole,and Gealt (1989); Varnedoe (1990); de la Croix, Tansey, and Kirk-patrick (1991); Hunter and Jacobus (1992); Sprocatti (1992);Strickland and Boswell (1992); Adams (1994); Fleming (1995);Stokstad (1995); Wilkins, Schultz, and Linduff (1997); Freeman(1998); Gilbert (1998); Bocola (1999); Britt (1999); Bell (2000);Kemp (2000); Dempsey (2002).

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the Soviet masses (Milner 1983, chaps. 9–10). The diversityof his activities is typical of conceptual artists, as is the factthat his later work lacked the innovativeness of the ambitiousproject he designed early in his career.

Meret Oppenheim

Tables 7 and 8 also identify a second one-hit wonder. MeretOppenheim ranks last in table 7, as the 25 books surveyedcontain only seven illustrations of her work—less than one-seventh as many as they have of Brancusi’s work, less thanone-fifth as many as Giacometti’s, and just over one-fifth asmany as Moore’s. But table 8 shows that all seven of Oppen-heim’s illustrations are of a single work, Déjeuner en four-rure, which places it in a tie with Brancusi’s single mostreproduced sculpture and ahead of any sculpture by eitherMoore or Giacometti. Remarkably, the only sculpture byMeret Oppenheim that appears in any of the textbooks is thusreproduced at least as often as any single work by three of thegreatest sculptors of the twentieth century.

Meret Oppenheim was born in Germany, grew up inSwitzerland, and went to Paris to study art at the age of 19.She worked under the informal guidance of several Surrealistartists she met there, including Alberto Giacometti and MaxErnst. Oppenheim considered her art to be the direct embod-iment of ideas: “Every idea is born with its forms. I carry outideas the way they enter my head. Where inspiration comesfrom is anybody’s guess but it comes with its form; it comesdressed, like Athena who sprang from the head of Zeus in hel-met and breastplate” (Curiger 1989, 20–21).

To support herself, Oppenheim began designing clothingand jewelry, using the same conceptual approach as in herpainting and sculpture. One day in 1936, she was sitting in theCafé de Flore with her friends Dora Maar and Pablo Picassowhen Picasso became intrigued with a bracelet Oppenheimhad made by covering metal tubing with fur. Picasso jokedthat one could cover anything with fur, and Oppenheimreplied, “Even this cup and saucer . . .” Shortly thereafter,André Breton invited Oppenheim to contribute to an exhibi-tion of Surrealist objects. Recalling her conversation withPicasso, Oppenheim bought a large cup and saucer with

spoon at a department store and covered the three objects withthe fur of a Chinese gazelle. Breton named the work Déjeuneren fourrure (Luncheon in Fur), which echoed Manet’s Dé-jeuner sur l’herbe. Later the same year, Alfred Barr boughtthe work for the collection of his recently established Muse-um of Modern Art in New York (Curiger 1989, 39).

Meret Oppenheim continued to make art past the age of70; a catalogue raisonné of her work includes approximate-ly 1,500 paintings, drawings, and sculptures (Curiger 1989,134–263). Yet the textbooks surveyed for this study demon-strate that she never became an important artist. Those text-books also demonstrate, however, that Déjeuner en fourrurebecame a famous work of art. Oppenheim’s sculpture was astriking embodiment of two central aspects of Surrealist art:it was an object with symbolic meaning, lacking in aesthet-ic quality and craftsmanship, and its symbolism placed itsquarely in a line of Surrealist works that represented sexu-al freedom. Thus, Robert Hughes (1982, 243) described theDéjeuner as “the most intense and abrupt image of lesbiansex in the history of art.” A sculpture made by a 23-year-oldartist as a result of a chance conversation in a Paris cafébecame an emblem of Surrealism, and both the fame of thework and the lack of fame of its young maker stem from thefact that Déjeuner en fourrure not only dramatically butalso fully expressed a single innovative idea.

Grant Wood

Tables 9 and 10 were produced after a search of 49 text-books published since 1968 for all the reproductions ofpaintings by five American artists of the early twentiethcentury. Grant Wood ranks last in table 9, with less than 60percent of the total number of illustrations as Edward Hop-per and Georgia O’Keeffe, and less than 70 percent as manyas Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis. But the positions arereversed in table 10, as Wood’s American Gothic is repro-duced in 24 of the books, 50 percent more often than Hop-per’s Nighthawks, and more than twice as often as anypainting by Sheeler, Davis, or O’Keeffe. American Gothicaccounts for two-thirds of the total number of illustrationsof Wood’s paintings and appears in eight times as many

108 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 8. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Sculpture by Artists Listed in Table 7

Sculptor Work Date No. of illustrations

Tatlin Monument to the Third International 1920 15Rodin Monument to Balzac 1898 12Brancusi Bird in Space 1928 7Oppenheim Déjeuner en fourrure 1936 7Moore Reclining Figure 1939 5Giacometti Man Pointing 1947 4Giacometti City Square 1948 4

Source. See table 7.

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books as Daughters of Revolution (1932) and ParsonWeems’ Fable (1939), the other two of Wood’s paintingsthat are most frequently reproduced.

Grant Wood was a largely self-taught artist. He lived inIowa throughout his life, but early in his career he made sev-eral trips to France. Those visits influenced his artistic devel-opment, as for nearly two decades he painted landscapes in astyle derived from Impressionism and such later artists asBonnard and Vuillard. In this early period, he worked visual-ly in front of his subject, with an emphasis on an appearanceof spontaneity and avoidance of smooth finish.

Wood’s art was changed by a commission he received in1927, when he was 36, to create a stained-glass window forthe Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. He hadpreviously begun his small oils by working directly on thecanvas, but making an image for a surface that would mea-sure 24 feet by 20 feet clearly required more careful plan-ning. Beginning with preliminary sketches, he eventually

made a full-scale working drawing of the entire design. In1928, Wood went to Germany to supervise the work of theMunich glass company that was to stain and assemble thewindow. Working with the German craftsmen gave him anew appreciation for the careful design of individual partsthat would fit together to create a unified whole, and for theprecision of fine craftsmanship. This new respect for an artbased on careful preparation and execution was reinforcedby the opportunity in Munich to study the paintings ofFlemish and German masters of the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies. Wood was particularly struck by these artists’ useof visual elements drawn from the everyday life of theirown locales (Dennis 1986, 67–78).

Wood’s style and subject matter changed when hereturned from Germany, as he set out to create his own dis-tinctive regionalist art under the inspiration of NorthernEurope’s Old Masters: “to my great joy, I discovered that inthe very commonplace, in my native surroundings, weredecorative adventures and that my only difficulty had beenin taking them too much for granted” (Dennis 1986, 75). In1930, a year after his return, Wood painted his masterpiece.American Gothic began with an oil sketch Wood made of ahouse he had seen in Eldon, Iowa; in keeping with his newsystematic approach, he also had a friend photograph thehouse. The selection of the house was done with care, asWood observed: “I know now that our cardboard framehouses on Iowa farms have a distinct American quality andare very paintable. To me their hard edges are especiallysuggestive of the Middle West civilization” (Dennis 1986,80). Wood then made a full sketch of his sitters with thehouse behind them, squaring the sketch for transfer to hiscanvas. That Wood’s intentions for his painting were notmerely visual is indicated by the fact that he changed thehouse, stretching it vertically by heightening the porch, andelongating a front window. He also changed his sitters, byelongating and thinning their unsmiling faces: “Any north-ern town old enough to have some buildings dating back tothe Civil War is liable to have a house or church in theAmerican Gothic style. I simply invented some AmericanGothic people to stand in front of a house of this type”(Dennis 1986, 80–85). The thin, vertical forms of the build-ing and the two figures are further echoed in the three long

TABLE 9. Total Number of Illustrations of Paintingsby Five American Artists

Artist No. of illustrations

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) 67Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) 61Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) 53Stuart Davis (1894–1964) 52Grant Wood (1892–1942) 36

Source. Haftmann (1965); Green (1966); McLanathan (1968);Novak (1969); Rose (1969); Hamilton (1970); McCoubrey et al.(1970); Mendelowitz (1970); Myron and Sundell (1971); Cleaver(1972); McLanathan (1973); Picon (1974); Spencer (1975);Davidson (1979); Taylor (1979); Lynton (1980); Russell (1981);Hughes (1982); Britsch and Britsch (1984); Sporre (1984); Arna-son and Wheeler (1986); Honour and Fleming (1986); Hartt(1989); Wood, Cole, and Gealt (1989); de la Croix, Tansey, andKirkpatrick (1991); Tamplin (1991); Hunter and Jacobus (1992);Strickland and Boswell (1992); Silver (1993); Adams (1994);Craven (1994); Fleming (1995); Stokstad (1995); Baigell (1996);Hughes (1997); Lucie-Smith (1997); Wilkins, Schultz, and Lin-duff (1997); Gebhardt (1998); Gilbert (1998); Lucie-Smith(1999); Preble, Preble, and Frank (1999); Tobler (1999); Kemp(2000); McCoubrey (2000); Prendeville (2000); Bjelajac (2001);Dempsey (2002); Doss (2002); Pohl (2002).

TABLE 10. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Painting by Artists Listed in Table 9

Artist Painting Date No. of illustrations

Wood American Gothic 1930 24Hopper Nighthawks 1942 16Sheeler American Landscape 1930 11Davis Lucky Strike 1921 9O’Keeffe Black Iris III 1926 9

Source. See table 9.

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prongs of the pitchfork that the farmer holds. Wood took thesitters’ clothing from nineteenth-century photographs, andtheir stiff poses mimic those of early long-exposure pho-tographs. On the whole, the painting is carefully planned togive a visual representation of a particular set of rural mid-western values, including rigidity, austerity, religiosity, andprovinciality (Corn 1983, 129–33). When Wood completedAmerican Gothic, he submitted it to the annual exhibition ofAmerican paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. It wasawarded a prize and was promptly purchased by the ArtInstitute. It was an immediate success with the public andquickly became an American icon, as the solemn couple hassince fascinated generations of viewers.

American Gothic was one of the first paintings Wood madewith the elaborate preparatory procedure he would follow forthe remainder of his career, methodically working up hisimages from preliminary sketches to full preparatory cartoonsbefore beginning to paint them. His compositions were care-fully measured and arranged according to a formula he called“the principle of thirds,” as he divided his surfaces into nineequal rectangles, then drew diagonals through the perpendic-ular intersections to serve as directional guides for all princi-pal contour lines (Dennis 1986, 222). He regretted the yearshe had spent painting spontaneously, and late in his life he dis-missed his early paintings as mere “wrist work,” because oftheir lack of planning and thought. He told a friend that he had“really found himself” in the early 1930s (Corn 1983, 33).

Most painters arrive at their mature styles early in theircareers. Grant Wood did not arrive at his trademark styleuntil he was in his late thirties. However, once he recog-nized the attractions of a conceptual approach, with carefulplanning and execution of images that would carry symbol-ic meanings, he produced the major work of his careeralmost immediately, using his knowledge of midwesternhistory and culture to create one of the most famous imagesin the history of American art.

Richard Hamilton

Table 11 shows that in a survey of 36 textbooks publishedsince 1980, Richard Hamilton’s work was illustrated less than

half as often as that of four leading American artists of the1950s and the ’60s, and slightly less than that of his country-man David Hockney. But table 12 shows that Hamilton’s Justwhat is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appeal-ing? appears in 21 of those texts, more than one and a halftimes as many as any single work by Robert Rauschenberg,Roy Lichtenstein, or Andy Warhol, more than twice as manyas any painting by Jasper Johns, and more than two and a halftimes as many as any work by Hockney. Just what is it?accounts for four-fifths of the total number of Hamilton’sillustrations, and four times as many as he, the only other ofHamilton’s works that appears in any of the books.

In London during the early 1950s, Richard Hamilton wasa member of the Independent Group, made up of youngartists who met informally to discuss their interest in massculture. They shared a fascination with American advertis-ing and graphic design and wanted to create an art that

110 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 11. Total Number of Illustrations of Works bySix Contemporary Painters

Painter No. of illustrations

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) 68Robert Rauschenberg (1925– ) 67Jasper Johns (1930– ) 63Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) 54David Hockney (1937– ) 30Richard Hamilton (1922– ) 26

Source. Russell (1981); Hughes (1982); Cornell (1983); Britschand Britsch (1984); Sporre (1984); Feldman (1985); Arnason andWheeler (1986); Honour and Fleming (1986); Hartt (1989);Wood, Cole, and Gealt (1989); de la Croix, Tansey, and Kirk-patrick (1991); Tamplin (1991); Wheeler (1991); Hunter andJacobus (1992); Sprocatti (1992); Strickland and Boswell (1992);Adams (1994); Stangos (1994); Wood et al. (1994); Janson andJanson (1995); Stokstad (1995); Dawtrey et al. (1996); Lucie-Smith (1997); Wilkins, Schultz, and Linduff (1997); Freeman(1998); Gebhardt (1998); Gilbert (1998); Britt (1999); Bell(2000); Hopkins (2000); Kemp (2000); Blistène (2001); Lucie-Smith (2001); Richter (2001); Dempsey (2002); Preble, Preble,and Frank (2002).

TABLE 12. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Work by Artists Listed in Table 11

Artist Work Date No. of illustrations

Hamilton Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956 21

Rauschenberg Monogram 1959 13Lichtenstein Whaam! 1963 12Warhol Marilyn Monroe Diptych 1962 11Johns Flag 1955 10Hockney A Bigger Splash 1967 8

Source. See table 11.

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would have the same kind of popular appeal. They alsowanted this art to bridge the growing gap between thehumanities and modern science and technology (Living-stone 1990, 33–36). In 1956, the Independent Group orga-nized a joint exhibition, “This Is Tomorrow,” which wasdesigned to examine the interrelationships between art andarchitecture. Hamilton agreed to create an image that couldbe used as a poster for the show. The result was a small col-lage titled Just what is it that makes today’s homes so dif-ferent, so appealing?

Hamilton began the work by making a list of subjectsthat included Man, Woman, History, Food, Cinema, TV,Newspapers, Telephone, Comics, Cars, Domestic Appli-ances, and Space, among other categories. Hamilton, hiswife, and another artist then searched through magazines,cutting out illustrations that could represent the categorieson Hamilton’s list. Hamilton then selected one image foreach category, choosing them according to how they wouldfit into the imaginary living space he was constructing.Among its component images, Just what is it? contains amale bodybuilder, a female pinup, a comic book cover, aninsignia for Ford automobiles, and even the word “Pop” ona large Tootsie Pop held up by the bodybuilder. The work’stitle was itself the caption from a discarded photograph(Morphet 1992, 149; Hamilton 1982, 22–24).

In 1956, years before Andy Warhol would reproducephotographic images or Roy Lichtenstein would mimiccomic books, a 34-year-old English artist had combinedthese techniques in a single work. In recognition of this,Marco Livingstone has declared Just what is it? to be “anextraordinary prophecy of the iconography of Pop.” Andappropriately for a prototype for a movement that wouldcelebrate commercial culture, Just what is it? not only wasmade from advertisements, but also was itself made to be anadvertisement. Just what is it? differed considerably fromthe work Hamilton did before it and after; Livingstone(1990, 34, 36) noted that it has become an icon of early Popart “in spite of being completely uncharacteristic of [Hamil-ton’s] work at that time.” This quality was in itself a char-acteristic of Hamilton’s work, for abrupt changes are com-mon among conceptual artists, who often adopt new stylesto express new ideas: Edward Lucie-Smith recognized thisquality when he observed that Hamilton’s “productions tendto differ radically from one another because each is theembodiment of an idea, and the idea itself has been allowedto dominate the material form” (Stangos 1994, 230).

Richard Hamilton has had a long career as a painter andart teacher. He is considered to have been a leading figurein British Pop art, and he has been honored by three retro-spective exhibitions at London’s Tate Gallery (Livingstone1990, 33). But, as table 11 emphasizes, he has neverachieved nearly the same level of fame or critical attentionas a number of American Pop artists of his cohort. His onlycelebrated work—Just what is it?—was an isolated concep-tual innovation. The rise of Pop art did not make Hamilton

a famous artist, but it did give Just what is it? a place in thecanon of contemporary art for its role as a forerunner of thedominant advanced art movement of the early 1960s.

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers

Based on a survey of 24 textbooks published since 1990,table 13 shows that for their total achievement Renzo Pianoand Richard Rogers rank far below several of the greatestmodern architects, as both have less than half as many illus-trations of their buildings in the texts as Le Corbusier andLudwig Mies van der Rohe, and less than three-quarters asmany as Walter Gropius. So it is remarkable that the CentreGeorges Pompidou (Pompidou Center) in Paris, designedby Piano and Rogers, is illustrated in 22 of the 24 textbooks,or more than any single building designed by Le Corbusier,Mies, or Gropius (table 14). The Pompidou accounts formore than 60 percent of the total number of illustrations ofPiano’s work, and more than three times as many as any ofhis other buildings, while it accounts for almost 70 percentof the total number of illustrations of the work of Rogers,and nearly three times as many as any of his other designs.

In 1971, the commission to design a new Parisian cultur-al center to house a museum of modern art, a public lendinglibrary, a center for visual research, several cinemas, andseveral restaurants was awarded to the partnership of theItalian architect Renzo Piano and the British architectRichard Rogers. The two young men, aged 34 and 38,respectively, were awarded the commission in an interna-tional competition that attracted more than 650 entries. Thebuilding opened in 1977 and quickly became one of themost popular tourist destinations in Paris.

The Pompidou Center was the first large-scale realizationof an idea that had been widely discussed during the 1960s:because buildings can change functions over time in unpre-dictable ways, they should be made as flexible as possible(Cruickshank 2000, 290; Donin 1982, 9). As Piano stressed,“constructing a building for culture at the beginning of theSeventies was an incredibly confused undertaking: the onlything to be done was to aim at convertibility” (Donin 1982,23). The theory held that buildings should be like machines,in that they should be made from standardized parts for easeof production and later maintenance and alterations. Largeinterior spaces that could easily be changed would allowtemporary subdivision for specific purposes; services—including even the movement of people—should be placedon the outside of the building, where they could easily bealtered or replaced and where they would not reduce theflexibility of the open interior spaces. In this approach,architecture provided a structural framework and supplied aset of services, but it eliminated all specificity of place oruse (Cruickshank 2000, 290).

The Pompidou is striking both because of its great sizeand its industrial appearance. It has been a great success asa cultural center, but it has in fact not served many of the

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innovative purposes Piano and Rogers had originallyintended. Thus, it was never extended over a larger area, itsparts have not become standard in other buildings, and it didnot become a prototype for other arts centers. Its great pop-ularity has stemmed not from its flexibility but instead fromthe novelty of its image (Cruickshank 2000, 290; Donin1982, 23). The Pompidou was a bold design by two daringyoung architects, and it attracted considerable criticism forits failure to blend into the surrounding Marais district.Piano later acknowledged that he and Rogers made mis-takes; he regretted that the Pompidou had required thedemolition of so many houses, and that it consequently wasnot linked as firmly to the neighborhood as he would haveliked. Nonetheless, he observed of the Pompidou that over-all “more than a mistake, it was a huge joke, a kind of facepulled at the cultural establishment” (Donin 1982, 27).

Piano and Rogers dissolved their partnership after com-pleting the Pompidou, and both have gone on to very suc-cessful careers, with major commissions and impressiveawards. Both are known for their high-tech designs andtheir enthusiasm for new materials and technologies. Butalthough both have produced a large body of work, neitherhas come close to designing another building as innovativeas the Pompidou, or as novel an embodiment of a generalarchitectural theory.

Gerrit Rietveld

Tables 13 and 14 also identify a second one-hit wonder.In table 13, Gerrit Rietveld stands well below Louis Kahn,with barely more than half as many total number of illus-trations. Kahn is widely considered to have been one of themost influential architects of the second half of the twenti-eth century (Doordan 2002, 206; Moffett, Fazio, and Wode-house 2004, 541; Scully 2002, 298–99). Yet Rietveld’s

Schröder House appears in more than twice as many booksas either of Kahn’s most frequently illustrated buildings(table 14). The dominant position of the Schröder House inRietveld’s career is clear, accounting for all but one of theillustrations of his architecture in the textbooks.

Gerrit Rietveld grew up working in his father’s cabinet-making shop, and by the time he was 11 he had begun tomake original designs for furniture. He spent the next twodecades working as a craftsman, designing furniture andjewelry. In 1919, he joined the Dutch art movement DeStijl; indeed, the year before that he had created the cele-brated Red-Blue Chair, which effectively applied their aes-thetic concerns to design.4

112 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 13. Total Number of Illustrations of Buildingsby Seven Modern Architects

Architect No. of illustrations

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) 94Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

(1886–1969) 71Walter Gropius (1883–1969) 48Renzo Piano (1937– ) 35Louis Kahn (1901–1974) 32Richard Rogers (1933– ) 32Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964) 17

Source. de la Croix, Tansey, and Kirkpatrick (1991); Tamplin(1991); Hunter and Jacobus (1992); Kulterman (1993); Adams(1994); Fleming (1995); Janson and Janson (1995); Stokstad(1995); Cruickshank (1996); Grieder (1996); Lucie-Smith (1997);Wilkins, Schultz, and Linduff (1997); Gilbert (1998); Glancey(1998); Theil-Siling (1998); Sutton (1999); Cruickshank (2000);Kemp (2000); Watkin (2000); Trachtenberg and Hyman (2001);Doordan (2002); Glancey (2003); Moffett, Fazio, and Wodehouse(2004); Sennott (2004).

TABLE 14. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Building by Architects Listed inTable 13

No. of Artist Building Date illustrations

Piano and Rogers Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1971–1977 22Gropius Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany 1926 20Le Corbusier Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp,

France 1950–1954 19Mies van der Rohe Seagram Building, New York

City 1958 18Rietveld Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht,

the Netherlands 1924 16Kahn Kimbell Art Museum, Fort

Worth, TX 1966–1972 7Kahn Salk Institute for Biological

Studies, La Jolla, CA 1959–1965 7

Source. See table 13.

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In 1919, Rietveld remodeled a jewelry shop, whicheventually led a Utrecht couple to hire him to design theirnew house. Rietveld would later design scores of otherbuildings in a long and distinguished career as an archi-tect, but the Schröder House, built in 1924 when he was36 years old, was his first house and by far his most inno-vative. Rietveld wanted to make buildings, like furniture,from mass-produced, standardized, and elementary com-ponents; the Schröder House is visibly assembled fromseparate parts (Brown 1958, 21, 41). It became celebratedalmost immediately as the architectural embodiment ofthe De Stijl movement’s philosophy and is typically castin that role by art historians even today. So, for example,Reyner Banham observed: “The surfaces are . . . assmooth and as neutral as those of a Mondriaan painting, insimilar colors.” The aggressive sparseness and simplicityof the design made the Schröder House the precursor ofmuch of later modern architecture: Banham (1975, 68)saw that “Here for the first time in 1924, the aesthetic pos-sibilities of the hard school of modern architecture wereuncompromisingly and brilliantly revealed . . . Machineaesthetic; rectangular space play; the bare minimum of themodern architecture that was to be.”

Rietveld became one of the leading Dutch architects ofhis time and applied his ideas to designing large-scale hous-ing and factories as well as individual family houses. Nev-ertheless, although he worked for another 40 years afterdesigning the Schröder House, his aesthetic did not subse-quently change in any basic way, and his designs becamemuch less startling in later years as more and more archi-tects emulated the new forms he had created for the firsthouse he ever designed.

Judy Chicago

Table 15 shows that 40 textbooks published since 1990contain more than five times as many illustrations of thework of Jasper Johns as of that of Judy Chicago. Chicago’swork in its entirety is also illustrated less than half as often

as that of Frank Stella, Cindy Sherman, or Bruce Nauman.Remarkably, however, table 16 shows that Chicago’s Din-ner Party appears in nearly 50 percent more textbooks thanany single work by Johns and in more than twice as manytexts as any single work by Stella, Sherman, or Nauman.Together, tables 15 and 16 clearly identify Chicago as aone-hit wonder, for The Dinner Party accounts for 90 per-cent of Chicago’s total number of illustrations; only two ofChicago’s other works appear in any of the books, and eachof those appears only once.

To symbolize the neglect by historians of women’s achieve-ments, Judy Chicago decided to create a work that would rein-terpret the Last Supper from a female point of view. When shefound she was unable to reduce the number of guests to 13,she redesigned the table as a triangle and tripled that number.For these places at the table, Chicago (1979, 11–12) selectedwomen who represented particular historical epochs, whoselives embodied a significant achievement, and who hadworked to improve conditions for women.

The Dinner Party was a complex conceptual work, withsymbolism at many levels. The sequential placement ofthe women around the table provided a historical narra-tive: “Beginning with pre-patriarchal society, The DinnerParty demonstrates the development of goddess worship,which represents a time when women had social andpolitical control . . . The piece then suggests the gradualdestruction of these female-oriented societies and theeventual domination of women by men, tracing the insti-tutionalizing of that oppression and women’s response toit” (Chicago 1979, 53). The material form of the work wassymbolic. Chicago used decorated plates to represent theguests: “Since plates are associated with eating, I thoughtimages on plates would convey the fact that the women Iplanned to represent had been swallowed up and obscuredby history instead of being recognized and honored”(ibid., 8). Chicago’s study of history made her realize thatwomen’s achievements were not made by isolated indi-viduals, so the placement of the table on a floor inscribedwith the names of other women symbolized the fact thatthe women at the table had risen from a foundation creat-ed by other women; each guest was chosen not only forthe significance of her own achievement but also to repre-sent the tradition from which she came. The arts used tomake the work were also symbolic, as Chicago (ibid.,13–15) chose china painting and embroidery because theywere genres traditionally used by women that had oftenbeen ignored by the men who wrote the history of art.

Chicago planned the work, then assembled a team of peo-ple to help her produce it. In all, more than 400 people—most, but not all, women—worked on The Dinner Party overa period of five years. The final work was large and intricate:

A triangular table, forty-eight feet per side, is arranged withthirty-nine commemorative settings in which sculpturalceramic plate forms, with napkins, knives, forks, spoons, andgoblets, sit on individualized needlework cloth runners . . .

TABLE 15. Total Number of Illustrations of Works byEight Contemporary American Artists

Artist No. of illustrations

Jasper Johns (1930– ) 108Frank Stella (1936– ) 73Cindy Sherman (1954– ) 46Richard Serra (1939– ) 44Bruce Nauman (1941– ) 43Eva Hesse (1936–1970) 36Judy Chicago (1939– ) 21Maya Lin (1960– ) 16

Source. Galenson (forthcoming, table 2).

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The whole is complemented by the additional 999 names ofwomen penned across the 2,300 lustrous triangular tiles thatcomprise the raised floor on which the table sits. The DinnerParty thus images a collaboration that is a collective or com-bined history of 1,038 women, through a process that wasitself collaborative. (Sackler 2002, 118–19)

In spite of the enormous effort and complex organiza-tion involved in the undertaking, Chicago (1996, 57, 78)had no doubt that the production of the work was not itsmost significant message: “I am often asked whether theprocess of creating The Dinner Party was even moreimportant than the final work of art, and my answer hasalways been no.” Her answer was a reflection of the con-ceptual nature of the work, which proved serendipitousfrom another point of view. The Dinner Party drew largecrowds when it was presented as a temporary exhibit at aseries of museums, but for many years Chicago was frus-trated by its failure to find a permanent home in a majormuseum. Because of its conceptual nature, however, shediscovered that its message could be communicated evenif the work was not displayed: “It was extremely fortu-itous that The Dinner Party was structured so that theinformation it embodied was able to enter the culture inseveral forms. Consequently, when the work of art wasblocked by the art system, the book [that Chicago wroteabout the work] brought the concept of the piece to whatturned out to be an extremely receptive audience.”

Maya Lin

Maya Lin is also identified as a one-hit wonder. Althoughher total of 16 illustrations in table 15 represents less than15 percent as many illustrations as the textbooks contain ofthe work of Jasper Johns, less than a quarter as many as thatof Frank Stella, and less than half as many as that of CindySherman or Bruce Nauman, table 16 shows that Lin’s Viet-nam Veterans Memorial appears in more books than anysingle work by those other artists. Her illustrations totalbarely one-third as many as those of the work of the sculp-tor Richard Serra, but the Memorial ties Serra’s Tilted Arc

for the distinction of being the single work made by anyAmerican artist during the 1980s that is most often repro-duced in the textbooks surveyed (Galenson forthcoming,table 3). Moreover, the Memorial is the only work of Lin’sthat appears in any of the 40 textbooks.

Lin chose to major in architecture in college because shesaw it as a way to combine art and science (Munro 2000, 481).During her senior year, she took a seminar on funereal archi-tecture in which her interest in the psychology of architectureled to a clash with her teacher. For a class project to design amemorial for World War III, she designed a tomblike under-ground structure that was intended to frustrate the viewer:

I remember the professor of the class, Andrus Burr, coming upto me afterward saying quite angrily, “If I had a brother whodied in that war, I would never want to visit this memorial.” Iwas somewhat puzzled that he didn’t quite understand WorldWar III would be of such devastation that none of us would bearound to visit any memorial, and that my design was insteada prewar commentary. In asking myself what a memorial to athird world war would be, I came up with a political statementthat was meant as a deterrent. (Lin 2000, 4:08)

The incident heightened Lin’s awareness that memorials arehighly charged politically and reinforced her belief thatmemorials constitute a separate genre: “They’re on theboundary between function and symbolism, because theirfunction is a symbolic one. They’re hybrids, in between artand architecture. Not sculpture either. In a separate catego-ry” (Munro 2000, 482).

At that time, there was a national design competition fora Vietnam veterans memorial, and Lin’s class took this taskas its final project. Lin and a few friends traveled to Wash-ington to see the intended site for the memorial. She laterrecalled that “it was at the site that the idea for the designtook shape”:

I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth.I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, openingit up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal.

When Lin returned to Yale, she made a sketch of her ideaand was initially concerned that it was too simple. She soon

114 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 16. Single Most Frequently Reproduced Work by Artists Listed in Table 15

Artist Work Date No. of illustrations

Chicago The Dinner Party 1979 19Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial 1982 16Serra Tilted Arc 1981 16Johns Three Flags 1958 13Nauman Self-Portrait as a Fountain 1970 8Hesse Hang Up 1966 7Stella Die Fahne Hoch 1959 7Sherman Untitled Film Still 1979 6

Source. Galenson (forthcoming, table 3).

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realized, however, that complicating the design wouldweaken it: “The image was so simple that anything added toit began to detract from it” (Lin 2000, 4:10–11).

After completing the seminar requirement, Lin submittedher design to the national competition, and the jury select-ed it as the winner. Although the choice occasioned a bitterdebate, in the course of which race and gender were raisedas objections to Lin’s selection, the Memorial was in factbuilt according to Lin’s original design. It was a radicalinnovation in memorial architecture, for its nonrepresenta-tional form owed a greater debt to Minimalist sculpture thanto any previous memorials. In spite of the simplicity of itsform, the Memorial incorporated a number of symbolicmeanings. So, for example, Lin made one of its walls pointtoward the Washington Monument, and the other toward theLincoln Memorial, thus creating sight lines that symboli-cally unify the country’s past and present. The black of theMemorial’s granite is the color of mourning. And instead ofthe traditional vertical form with which many memorialstriumphantly dominate the landscape, the horizontality ofthe Memorial, embedded in the ground, suggests a humblercommemoration of the soldiers who died in a war that wasnot a triumph.

The Memorial was dedicated in the fall of 1982, just 18months after Lin graduated from college. It quickly becamerecognized as a moving tribute to the soldiers who had diedin Vietnam, and at the age of 22 Lin had become a famousarchitect. In a memoir published in 2000, she confessed that“I used to dread it whenever some large-scale disasterwould happen because I inevitably would get a fax aboutwhether I could design a memorial to . . . which I wouldpolitely decline” (Lin 2000, 12:03). Although Lin has nowexecuted commissions from such institutions as the Univer-sity of Michigan, the Rockefeller Foundation, the SouthernPoverty Law Center, and even her alma mater, Yale, none ofthese works appears in the textbooks surveyed for thisstudy. Lin’s first significant project dominates perceptionsof her work, just as it dominates the current understandingof memorial architecture. Thus, when the eight final designsunder consideration for the memorial to the victims of the2001 attack on the World Trade Center were announced bythe five-member jury—of which Lin was a member—theNew Yorker’s architecture critic explained the disappoint-ment of both critics and the public by observing that “in thepost-Vietnam-memorial age, we may have come to expecttoo much of a memorial . . . Lin’s Vietnam memorial set thebar very high” (Goldberger 2003, 50).

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial “was born of an instan-taneous idea to cut open the earth.” Its sudden origin was nomore accidental than the radical innovation it embodied, orthe fact that it was produced by a college student with noprofessional experience as an architect. All of these featurescan be seen as consequences of Lin’s (2000, 4:44–45) con-ceptual approach to her enterprise: “In my art, a simpleclear idea or moment of inspiration is the soul of the piece.”

Conclusion

There are many fewer one-hit wonders in the visual artsthan in popular music, but this study has shown that one-hitwonders have played a significant role in modern art andthat it is useful to consider them as a group. The 13 artistsconsidered here may not represent all the significant one-hitwonders of the modern era, but it is unlikely that there aremany more cases of comparable importance, and it is evenmore unlikely that any additional cases would significantlychange the basic profile that emerges from this survey.

The 13 artists examined here were motivated by a varietyof goals. Some were motivated by social concerns, rangingfrom protests against injustice to the pursuit of better formsof government; the three architects were concerned withcreating more efficient public and private buildings; andsome had more purely artistic goals. But regardless of theirspecific motivations, all 13 worked conceptually: theirinnovations expressed ideas, often by applying general prin-ciples, and many had expressly symbolic aims. The paintersin the group generally planned their works carefully andexecuted them methodically.

For conceptual artists, creative life clearly does not beginat 40. Of the 13 artists considered here, only Judy Chicagohad not completed her masterwork before celebrating her40th birthday, and she finished her Dinner Party before shereached 41. Five of the 13 made their greatest works beforethe age of 30, and three produced their hits by the age of 25.

One of the most puzzling features of the careers of con-ceptual innovators in general is the decline in their creativ-ity that often begins at a surprisingly early age. I believethat a principal reason for this decline is the loss of claritythat occurs as the accumulation of professional experiencemakes them increasingly aware of the complexity of theirdisciplines and progressively robs them of the ability to for-mulate bold and simple new approaches. Although concep-tual innovators may continue to innovate as they grow older,their innovations tend to become narrower in scope andapplication as their awareness of the complexity of theirdisciplines increases. The evidence of the one-hit wondersis suggestive in this context. Three of the very simplestideas in this sample—Sérusier’s painting The Talisman,Oppenheim’s design of Déjeuner en fourrure, and Lin’sdesign of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—were producedby the three youngest innovators in the group. In contrast,one of the most complex projects, Chicago’s Dinner Party,was produced by the oldest innovator in the sample. TheTalisman was produced in one morning, and both the Dé-jeuner and the Memorial were virtually fully designed in asingle moment of inspiration, whereas the idea of the Din-ner Party required extended adaptation and change beforetaking its final form.

Although the phenomenon of the one-hit wonder has notreceived systematic study, it also appears to exist in otherintellectual activities. A number of writers, for example, have

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produced one important novel that dominates their otherworks: even a partial list might include Mary Shelley, HarrietBeecher Stowe, Bram Stoker, Margaret Mitchell, Henry Roth,Malcolm Lowry, William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, J. D.Salinger, Jack Kerouac, and Joseph Heller. We are aware thatthese writers were one-hit wonders because of the largeamount of critical attention that is devoted to novels and nov-elists, but the same phenomenon probably also exists in theother arts and in most, if not all, scholarly disciplines.5

The analysis used in this study appears to have severalimplications for the phenomenon of the one-hit wonderwherever it occurs. As is the case for the 13 artists dis-cussed, it appears that practitioners of any discipline whoproduce a single isolated masterpiece are likely to be con-ceptual innovators, theorists who think and work deductive-ly, rather than experimental innovators, empiricists whowork inductively. And related to this prediction is a secondone: as is also the case for the artists studied here, one-hitwonders in all disciplines are likely to execute their singlemajor work early in their careers.

In view of the enormous importance of innovation, it is tobe hoped that the success of the analysis used here in under-standing the conceptual basis of the achievements of one-hitwonders in the visual arts will prompt more scholars to exam-ine this phenomenon in other disciplines. One result may beconvincing explanations of career patterns of creativity thathave previously been considered immune to systematicanalysis. Another, even greater result may be an improvedunderstanding of human creativity in general that may lead toan ability to increase individual creativity. Why do some con-ceptual innovators make a single, early innovation and fail toproduce any other significant work, whereas others go on toproduce a series of important contributions? The answer tothis question may now be within reach, through the use ofcase studies like those presented here, with research projectsdesigned to compare the one-hit wonders with their peerswho make a number of innovations.

In the past, economists have generally been unwilling tostudy the careers of individuals, just as humanists have beenunwilling to carry out systematic comparisons of thecareers of significant numbers of individuals. Yet now, thepossibility of increasing the contributions of some of themost innovative members of our society, through knowl-edge gained from systematic studies of limited numbers ofinnovators, may be sufficiently great not only to induce botheconomists and humanists to overcome whatever method-ological objections have prevented these studies in the past,but also to expand their research agenda to the systematicstudy of the careers of innovators.

NOTES

I thank Robert Jensen and Joshua Kotin for suggestions and discussions ofthe issues treated in this article, and the National Science Foundation forfinancial support.

1. I thank Robert Jensen for these data.

2. For a listing, see Varnedoe (1987, 203–4).3. The Monument could have been treated here as a building and com-

pared with works by architects. But because of Tatlin’s training as a sculp-tor, and the impracticality of his design as a building, the Monument istreated as a sculpture.

4. The Red-Blue Chair is illustrated in a number of textbooks of archi-tecture. Those illustrations are not tabulated in table 13 because they do notinvolve the design of buildings.

5. One-hit wonders have not been systematically studied in other arts, orin academic disciplines, but the existence of both conceptual and experimen-tal innovators has been documented in arts other than painting—for example,see Galenson (2004b)—and, in economics, see Galenson and Weinberg(2004). The prediction in the text is based on the proposition that among con-ceptual innovators in any intellectual activity, there are likely to be some whoproduce a single important innovation, generally early in their careers, that isnot followed by other contributions of comparable importance.

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