TY - JOUR AU - Bruegel,Martin AU - Galenson,David W. TI - Measuring Masters and Masterpieces: French Rankings of French Painters and Paintings from Realism to Surrealism JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8266 PY - 2001 Y2 - May 2001 DO - 10.3386/w8266 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8266 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8266.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Galenson Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773/702-8258 Fax: 773/702-8490 E-Mail: galenson@uchicago.edu AB - For 35 leading painters who worked in France during the first century of modern art, this paper uses illustrations in French textbooks as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings closely resemble those obtained earlier from a similar analysis of American textbooks. They also pose a puzzle: why do some of the greatest artists not produce famous paintings, while some relatively minor artists produce famous individual works? The answer appears to lie in a difference in approach between experimental artists, who innovate incrementally, and conceptual innovators, who produce individual breakthrough works. This paper further demonstrates the value of quantifying artistic success, for doing so can improve our understanding of the sources of human creativity. ER -