Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest Modern American Painter?: A Quantitative Investigation

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

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 Expressionists produced their most important contributions late in their careers, whereas their successors innovated early in theirs. This difference in life cycles resulted from the differing approaches of the artists, for the Expressionists were experimental innovators who developed new visual images by a process of trial and error, while on the contrary the leading artists of the 1960s were conceptual innovators, whose work embodied new ideas.