Creativity from Interaction: Artistic Movements and the Creativity Careers of Modern Painters

Abstract

This article revisits David W. Galenson’s work on the relationship between artistic creativity and the life cycle of artists. Galenson introduces a simple classification of creativity careers (early vs. late-bloomers), relates it to a bipartite typology of creativity (conceptual vs. experimental innovators) and builds on this typology to explain the decreasing trend of age at which artists were most creative over several generations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing on Galenson’s measures, the present paper uses a different approach to overcome possible criticisms to his design. Applying sequence analysis to creativity careers of 41 major modern painters, it also yields a fairly different story from the one Galenson proposes. In particular, I show that a typology of creativity should distinguish between creativity occurring within artistic movements and other forms of creativity. This distinction is important, for the decrease in age at peak creativity over time seems actually driven by the evolution of movement-related creativity alone. Investigating the specific issue of creativity over the life cycle of artists, and showing that movements and interactions play an important part in the picture, the paper thus suggests there is something more than the mere individual involved in artistic creativity.

Keywords: Creativity, life cycle, optimal matching analysis