David W Galenson
Biographic Data
| ID | 380615 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David W Galenson |
| GIVEN NAMES | David W |
| FAMILY NAME | Galenson |
| SIGNATURE | GALENSON D W |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 90 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 255 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 90 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Marketing modern art
This paper demonstrates that application of economic analysis and concepts adds central elements to our understanding even of one of the most intensively studied episodes in the history of art. Art historians have long recognized that a radical change occurred in the appearance of fine art during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but they have failed to explain why this happened when it did. The answer lies in a change in the structure…
Revising the canon
Two old masters and a young genius
The economics of art history
The study of art history has been traditionally focused on the description of artistic innovations, the role of the artists and the meaning of the artworks. It has often neglected the broader reasons why certain innovations took place in certain places, in specific times and in particular ways. We believe that the impact of institutional and economic factors has been critical in shaping the evolution of art history, and quantitative methods can b…
Economic History
Experimental and Conceptual Innovators in the Sciences
During the past decade, analyses of artistic creativity have demonstrated the contrast in creative life cycles between experimental old masters and conceptual young geniuses. This article extends the analysis to scientists. Charles Darwin was a great experimental innovator, who spent decades accumulating evidence on evolution and its mechanisms, and made his greatest contributions late in his career. In contrast, Albert Einstein was a great conce…
From the New Wave to the New Hollywood
Two great movie directors were both born in 1930. One of them, Jean-Luc Godard, revolutionized filmmaking during his 30s and declined in creativity thereafter. In contrast, Clint Eastwood did not direct his first movie until he had passed the age of 40 and did not emerge as an important director until after he was 60. This dramatic difference in life cycles was not accidental, but was a characteristic example of a pattern that has been identified…
From "White Christmas" to Sgt. Pepper
Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era, the second quarter of the twentieth century, wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative …
Two Paths to Abstract Art
Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich were both great Russian painters who became pioneers of abstract art during the second decade of the twentieth century. Yet the forms of their art differed radically, as did their artistic methods and goals. Kandinsky, an experimental artist, approached abstraction tentatively and visually, by gradually and progressively concealing forms drawn from nature, whereas Malevich, a conceptual innovator, plunged precipitou…
Analyzing Artistic Innovation
The true subject of art history is the succession of innovations that have changed the practices of artists over time. This article uses a survey of illustrations in textbooks to consider not only when in their careers the greatest artists of the twentieth century made their greatest discoveries but also how quickly they made them. The results underscore the dominant position of Pablo Picasso and Cubism in twentieth-century art: Picasso alone acc…
And Now for Something Completely Different; The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
Art critics and scholars have puzzled over the behavior of Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke, three important modern painters who have made frequent and abrupt changes of style. In each case, assuming this behavior to be idiosyncratic, the experts consequently failed to recognize its common basis. But stylistic versatility is in fact often a characteristic of conceptual innovators whose ability to solve specific problems can free t…
Filming Images or Filming Reality
Why have some movie directors made important films early in their careers but subsequently failed to match their initial successes, whereas other directors have begun much more modestly but have made great movies late in life? The authors demonstrate that the answer lies in the directors' motivations and in the nature of their films. Conceptual directors, who use their films to express ideas or emotions, mature early; thus, such great conceptual …
Artistic Capital
At what stage of their careers do great artists produce their most important work? In a series of studies that bring new insights and new dimensions to the study of artistic creativity, Galenson’s new book examines the careers of more than one hundred modern painters, poets and novelists to reveal a powerful relationship between age and artistic creativity. Analyzing the careers of major literary and artistic figures, such as Cézanne, van Gogh, D…
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young or Old Innovator Measuring the Careers of Modern Novelists
Some important novelists have written a great novel early in their careers and have produced lesser works thereafter, whereas others have improved their work gradually over long periods and have made their major contributions late in their lives. Which of these patterns a novelist follows appears to be systematically related to the nature of his work. Conceptual writers typically have specific goals for their books, and they produce novels that e…
Toward Abstraction Ranking European Painters of the Early Twentieth Century
Paris was the unrivaled capital of modern art in the nineteenth century, but during the early twentieth century major innovations began to be made elsewhere in Europe. The author examined the careers of the artists who led such movements as Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Holland's De Stijl, and Russia's Suprematism. Quantitative analysis revealed the implications of the conceptual basis of the art of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico,…
Real Estate Prices Determine the Sizes of Paintings
The Reappearing Masterpiece
A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the textbooks reveals the source of the "pluralism," or stylistic incoherence, of American art since the late 1960s. A persistently high demand for artistic innovati…
Literary Life Cycles
The author examines the careers of 11 leading twentieth-century American poets. Using the frequency with which poems are reprinted in anthologies as a measure of their importance, quantitative analysis reveals that among these poets there were two distinctly different life cycles: one group produced their most important work early in their careers—in their 20s and 30s; whereas the other group produced their most important work considerably later—…
One-Hit Wonders
How can minor artists produce major works of art? The author considers 13 modern visual artists, each of whom produced a single masterpiece that dominates the artist's career. The artists include painters, sculptors, and architects, and their masterpieces include works as prominent as the painting American Gothic, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. In each case, these isolated achievements w…
The Life Cycles of Modern Artists
In earlier research, the author has contrasted the methods and life cycles of conceptual innovators, who express specific ideas and produce their major discoveries early in their careers, with those of experimental artists, who present visual perceptions and arrive at their major contributions late in life. This article extends the analysis: it shows that the binary division between the two types of artists is a qualitative approximation to an un…
Quantifying Artistic Success
For 35 leading painters who lived in France during the first century of modern art, this article uses textbook illustrations as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings pose an interesting puzzle: Why do some of the greatest artists not produce famous paintings, and why do some relatively minor artists produce some of the most famous individual paintings? The answer may lie in an important dif…
The New York School versus the School of Paris
American historians of modern art routinely assume that after World War II New York replaced Paris as the center of the western art world. An analysis of the illustrations in French textbooks shows that French art scholars disagree: they rate Jean Dubuffet as the most important painter of the era, ahead of Jackson Pollock, and they consider Yves Klein's anthropometries of 1960 as the greatest contribution of a single year, in front of Andy Warhol…
Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest Modern American Painter
A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art demonstrates that scholars do consider Jackson Pollock the most important modern American painter, but not by a wide margin over Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, the leading artists of the following generation. The distribution of the illustrations furthermore reveals a sharp contrast in the careers of the major artists of these two generations: the Abstract Expressionists produced their most …
Masterpieces and Markets
A survey of the illustrations in art history textbooks reveals that the most important Modern American painters, including Pollock, Johns, and Warhol, failed to produce individual paintings as famous as the masterpieces of a number of major French artists, such as Picasso, Manet, and Seurat. Analysis of the textbooks reveals that art historians do not consider the American artists to be less important than their French predecessors or judge the A…
Measuring Masters and Masterpieces
Cet article prend en compte des illustrations reproduites dans des ouvrages francais comme elements de mesure de l'importance des peintures et aussi des peintres, a partir de l'exemple de 35 artistes majeurs qui travaillerent en France au cours d'un siecle d'art moderne. Les classements ressemblent etroitement a ceux qui avaient ete obtenus precedemment a partir d'une analyse identique conduite avec des ouvrages americains. Ils posent egalement u…
The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas
Indentured servitude appeared in Virginia by 1620. Initially a device used to transport European workers to the New World, over time servitude dwindled as black slavery grew in importance in the British colonies. Indentured servitude reappeared in the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century as a means of transporting Asians to the Caribbean sugar islands and South America following the abolition of slavery. Servitude then remained in legal use unt…
Economic Opportunity on the urban frontier
This article uses evidence drawn from the manuscripts of the 1850 and 1860 federal censuses to investigate the correlates of the wealth of adult males in Chicago. The analysis reveals rapidly increasing wealth with age, a substantial positive effect on wealth of duration of residence in the city, and an absence of any significant impact of nativity on wealth when controlling occupation. Mean wealth rose from well below the national average in 185…
Chinese immigration and contract labor in the late nineteenth century
Economic and Geographic Mobility on the Farming Frontier
This article investigates the characteristics of early settlers on the midwestern farming frontier, the correlates of their geographic mobility, and the determinants of their wealth. Using evidence drawn from the 1850, 1860, and 1870 federal censuses we find average rates of growth of wealth over time that were considerably above the national average, a steeper cross-sectional relationship between wealth and age than those found for contemporary …
Nativity and Wealth in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cities
This article uses evidence from the manuscripts of the 1860 federal census to analyze the wealth of adult males in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Indianapolis. Previous multivariate analyses of wealth from the census have been flawed by reliance on ordinary least squares; we instead use quantile regression. Immigrants fared considerably better in the Midwest than the East: immigrants in the midwestern cities held more wealth than their eastern co…
Quantifying Artistic Success
For 35 leading painters who lived in France during the first century of modern art, this article uses textbook illustrations as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings pose an interesting puzzle: Why do some of the greatest artists not produce famous paintings, and why do some relatively minor artists produce some of the most famous individual paintings? The answer may lie in an important dif…
Log-linear analysis of contingency tables
For historians or other social scientists whose data is available in discreet (nominal- or ordinal-level) form, recently developed "log-linear" multivariate statistical techniques offer considerable advantages over commonsensical devices and are in many respects superior to such multivariate methods as multiple classification analysis, weighted least-squares, and logit. Reanalyzing Thernstrom's Boston data on geographic mobility, we explain the i…
White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America
The role of white servitude evolved in a similar way during the American colonial period in those West Indian and southern mainland colonies where slavery became quantitatively important. The change from primary reliance on bound white labor to the use of slaves occurred in two steps, with an initial transition from servants to slaves in unskilled field work, followed some time later by widespread training of blacks and substitution of slaves for…
Age and the Quality of Work
Psychologists have found that the age at which successful practitioners typically do their best work varies across professions, but they have not considered whether these peak ages change over time, as economic models suggest they might. Using auction records, we estimate the relationship between artists' ages and the value of their paintings for two successive cohorts of leading modern American painters: de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and others b…
Quantile Regression Analysis of Censored Wealth Data
(1994). Quantile Regression Analysis of Censored Wealth Data. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 149-165
Immigration and the colonial labor system an analysis of the length of indenture
The Market Evaluation of Human Capital
This paper examines the market for human capital created by the institution of indentured servitude in colonial America. The indenture system allowed English emigrants to obtain passage to the colonies by selling claims on their future labor. With the size of the debt approximately equal for all emigrants, the length of the term for which a servant was bound is predicted to have varied inversely with expected productivity in the colonies. Analysi…
The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Barbados Market, 1673–1723
Evidence drawn from records of auctions held by the Royal African Company in Barbados between 1673 and 1723 is used to obtain annual estimates of slave prices by demographic category. These price series are then used to investigate the implications of an economic analysis of the demographic composition of the slave trade. The results provide quantitative support for the prediction that rising slave prices in the West Indies caused an increase in …
Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest Modern American Painter
A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art demonstrates that scholars do consider Jackson Pollock the most important modern American painter, but not by a wide margin over Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, the leading artists of the following generation. The distribution of the illustrations furthermore reveals a sharp contrast in the careers of the major artists of these two generations: the Abstract Expressionists produced their most …
Measuring Masters and Masterpieces
Cet article prend en compte des illustrations reproduites dans des ouvrages francais comme elements de mesure de l'importance des peintures et aussi des peintres, a partir de l'exemple de 35 artistes majeurs qui travaillerent en France au cours d'un siecle d'art moderne. Les classements ressemblent etroitement a ceux qui avaient ete obtenus precedemment a partir d'une analyse identique conduite avec des ouvrages americains. Ils posent egalement u…
Traders, Planters, and Slaves
List of tables Preface 1. The Atlantic slave trade and the early development of the English West Indies 2. Shipping and mortality 3. Slave prices in the Barbados market, 1673-1723 4. On the order of purchases by characteristics at slave sales 5. The demographic composition of the slave trade: an economic investigation 6. Establishing geographic persistence from market observations: population turnover among estate owners and managers in Barbados …
The Slave Trade to the English West Indies, 1673-1724
ECONOMIC historians concerned with the supply of labour to the New World colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long taken an interest in the operation of the transatlantic slave trade. African slaves were of major importance to the economy of colonial America, and their central role makes a knowledge of the conditions of their supply and the factors that determined those conditions critical to an understanding of the economic …
A Note on Biases in the Measurement of Geographic Persistence Rates
Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America
(1980). Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 13, Approaches and Methods in Early American History, pp. 3-18
Literacy and the Social Origins of Some Early Americans
An issue that has long concerned historians of colonial America is that of the social origins of the English men and women who came to the New World in bondage. It has been estimated that half of all white immigration to the thirteen colonies was made up of indentured servants; therefore no quantitative description of the labour force or the social structure of colonial America is possible without some knowledge of what kinds of people bound them…
British Servants and the Colonial Indenture System in the Eighteenth Century
Literary Life Cycles
The author examines the careers of 11 leading twentieth-century American poets. Using the frequency with which poems are reprinted in anthologies as a measure of their importance, quantitative analysis reveals that among these poets there were two distinctly different life cycles: one group produced their most important work early in their careers—in their 20s and 30s; whereas the other group produced their most important work considerably later—…
The Life Cycles of Modern Artists
In earlier research, the author has contrasted the methods and life cycles of conceptual innovators, who express specific ideas and produce their major discoveries early in their careers, with those of experimental artists, who present visual perceptions and arrive at their major contributions late in life. This article extends the analysis: it shows that the binary division between the two types of artists is a qualitative approximation to an un…
Masterpieces and Markets
A survey of the illustrations in art history textbooks reveals that the most important Modern American painters, including Pollock, Johns, and Warhol, failed to produce individual paintings as famous as the masterpieces of a number of major French artists, such as Picasso, Manet, and Seurat. Analysis of the textbooks reveals that art historians do not consider the American artists to be less important than their French predecessors or judge the A…
Ethnic Differences in Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Boys in Early Chicago
In recent years social scientists have devoted increasing attention to the question of how members of ethnic and racial minorities are affected by living in segregated neighborhoods. A central concern has been that the poverty of these neighborhoods may be self-perpetuating. One obvious possibility is that this could be caused by reducing human capital formation: children in ghettos might be less likely than their counterparts elsewhere to attend…
The End of the Chisholm Trail
The Long Drive has captured the popular imagination to an extent almost unmatched by other events in American history. The Chisholm Trail, the Red River, Abilene, and Dodge City are only a few of the names that owe their immortalization to the cattle drives of the two decades after the Civil War; such legendary figures as Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson owe their glorification to the cattle towns of Kansas, which gr…
Cattle Trailing in the Nineteenth Century
In responding to Mr. Dennen, I welcome the opportunity to clarify several points that may have been misunderstood by the readers of this Journal. Mr. Dennen makes three main criticisms, which I will deal with in the order he raised them
Immigration and the colonial labor system an analysis of the length of indenture
British Servants and the Colonial Indenture System in the Eighteenth Century
Middling People" or "Common Sort
Nearly two decades ago Mildred Campbell published a path-breaking essay entitled Social Origins of Some Early Americans.' The essay was quickly recognized as an important contribution, and it has since achieved a firmly established position as the most important quantitative study of the social origins of the English men and women who came to the British New World colonies in the seventeenth century.2
Literacy and the Social Origins of Some Early Americans
An issue that has long concerned historians of colonial America is that of the social origins of the English men and women who came to the New World in bondage. It has been estimated that half of all white immigration to the thirteen colonies was made up of indentured servants; therefore no quantitative description of the labour force or the social structure of colonial America is possible without some knowledge of what kinds of people bound them…
The Social Origins of Some Early Americans
Both Mildred Campbell's Social Origins of Some Early Americans' and my own recent reconsideration' deal with a single central problem: the interpretation of the evidence in two sets of seventeenth-century servant registrations for the social origins of those registered. Both papers acknowledge that the records pose some problems, yet both of us have made inferences and drawn conclusions from the evidence. All of our inferences are based on interp…
The Slave Trade to the English West Indies, 1673-1724
ECONOMIC historians concerned with the supply of labour to the New World colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have long taken an interest in the operation of the transatlantic slave trade. African slaves were of major importance to the economy of colonial America, and their central role makes a knowledge of the conditions of their supply and the factors that determined those conditions critical to an understanding of the economic …
Demographic aspects of white servitude in colonial british America
L'étude vise à mettre en évidence les aspects démographiques de la domesticité blanche dans les colonies anglaises d'Amérique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, en comparant ces données avec celles que nous possédons pour l'Angleterre et en les rapportant également à celles connues pour la société américaine. La domesticité était si répandue en Angleterre à l'époque pré-industrielle qu'elle a été tout naturellement utilisée aux colonies mais avec une n…
Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America
(1980). Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History: Vol. 13, Approaches and Methods in Early American History, pp. 3-18
White servitude in colonial America
Revision of the author's thesis (Ph.D.--Harvard University, 1979) with the title: The indenture system and the colonial labor market.Includes index. Bibliography: p. 279-283.
The Chesapeake in the seventeenth century. Essays on Anglo-American society
Measuring Colonial Wealth
The Market Evaluation of Human Capital
This paper examines the market for human capital created by the institution of indentured servitude in colonial America. The indenture system allowed English emigrants to obtain passage to the colonies by selling claims on their future labor. With the size of the debt approximately equal for all emigrants, the length of the term for which a servant was bound is predicted to have varied inversely with expected productivity in the colonies. Analysi…
White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America
The role of white servitude evolved in a similar way during the American colonial period in those West Indian and southern mainland colonies where slavery became quantitatively important. The change from primary reliance on bound white labor to the use of slaves occurred in two steps, with an initial transition from servants to slaves in unskilled field work, followed some time later by widespread training of blacks and substitution of slaves for…
Literacy and Age in Preindustrial England
This paper presents multivariate estimates of the relationship between the ability to sign and a number of individual characteristics for two groups of English men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Log-linear analysis of contingency tables
For historians or other social scientists whose data is available in discreet (nominal- or ordinal-level) form, recently developed "log-linear" multivariate statistical techniques offer considerable advantages over commonsensical devices and are in many respects superior to such multivariate methods as multiple classification analysis, weighted least-squares, and logit. Reanalyzing Thernstrom's Boston data on geographic mobility, we explain the i…
White Servitude in Colonial America
Journal Article White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. By David W. Galenson. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. xii + 291 pp. Illustrations, charts, tables, appendixes, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $29.50.) Get access Gary M. Walton Gary M. Walton University of California, Davis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 69, Issue 3,…
The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Barbados Market, 1673–1723
Evidence drawn from records of auctions held by the Royal African Company in Barbados between 1673 and 1723 is used to obtain annual estimates of slave prices by demographic category. These price series are then used to investigate the implications of an economic analysis of the demographic composition of the slave trade. The results provide quantitative support for the prediction that rising slave prices in the West Indies caused an increase in …
A Deplorable Scarcity
Indentured Servitude and the First Sunbelt Migration
White Servitude in Colonial America
Structure and Change in Economic History . Douglass C. North
The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade
White Servitude in Colonial America
History (42 works) · Political science (41 works) · Economics (38 works) · History (34 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (30 works) · Law (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Art (25 works) · Art history (22 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (20 works)