Abstract
This article compiles original data relating to artists’ place of birth and work migration patterns using various art history dictionaries. The broad historic pattern, from the 13th to the 20th century, of the birth locations of prominent artists is examined, followed by a detailed study of the work migration patterns of prominent artists in two important situations, namely Renaissance Italy and France in part of the 19th century. The evidence indicates a marked clustering of activity of prominent artists, both arising from birth location and migration patterns. Some possible explanations for the observed patterns are briefly outlined.
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Notes
It is based on the use of column space devoted to artists in art dictionaries and was checked against more complex and labour intensive methods for a sample of the 876 artists chosen (see O’Hagan and Kelly 2005; Galenson 2002). Murray (2003, Chap. 5) has an illuminating discussion of this issue and dates the quest to measure gradations of greatness in different areas back to 1869, a field now known as historiometry. Murray’s work in this regard was significantly influenced by the work of Sidmonton (see for example Sidmonton, 1990).
Murray (2003) has indicated that in all of the areas he studied between ten and twenty ‘giants’ of the discipline dominate, with perhaps not much to choose then between the following 500 or so important contributions. While as mentioned the purpose of our work was not to rank artists, it might for the curious be of interest to note that the top 20 artists in our sample were Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Velázquez, Titian, Da Vinci, Poussin, Rubens, Picasso, Raphael, Bernini, Dürer, Goya, Turner, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Giorgione, Vermeer, Gaugin, Holbein and Manet.
The countries included under ‘Rest of Europe’ are as follows: Belorussia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.
The countries that are included under ‘Rest of the World’ are as follows: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Danish Virgin Islands, Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Art dictionaries were used because they contain biographical information on artists in terms of when and where the artist was born, where they trained and spent their working lives, and when and where they died.
Using year of birth though means that the important work related to these artists would on average relate more to the second half of the 20th century.
Murray (2003) covered the sciences (1,445 significant figures), Western literature (835), Western music (523), Western art (479), non-Western literature (293), non-Western art (192) and Philosophy (239).
The reasons for this would be similar to that for the British Isles but should apply with less force (see O’Hagan and Kelly 2005).
Indeed, it is possible that another dictionary might give a very different set of top 800 artists in general. This could be more the case in relation to ranking of the ‘top 800’ artists than simply picking the top 800, a point borne out by the extraordinary overlap between the top artists identified here and those in Galenson (2002) and Murray (2003).
See Murray (2003) for a discussion of the trends, adjusted for population, in the number of prominent artists over the centuries.
The following is based on an examination of all of the prominent artists born in Italy in these centuries. Hall (1998) refers to a study which analysed a sample of around 600 Renaissance painters, sculptors, humanists, writers, composers and scientists, indicating that 26 per cent of the total came from Tuscany.
It would be an interesting exercise to compare the total time spent on work-related travel over the different centuries.
Based on the 2.2 column-inch dataset, a total of 24 British Isle artists were born between 1800 and 1849. Eight are excluded from the labour mobility analysis undertaken here––one Irish, one Scottish and six English––as they were not listed in the German art dictionary. All of the six artists from the United States born in this period were listed in the German dictionary.
For artists who undertook just one long-term movement, that is artists who remained in the location they moved to after leaving their place of birth, the period of time covered by ‘long-term’ is the rest of their life. For artists who engaged in repeat migration, artists who moved again from the initial place they migrated to after leaving their birth place (i.e. artists who divided their working life between two or more locations), the period of time covered varies from a minimum of 3 years (professorships) to 64 years. Some artists who undertook long-term movement returned to their place of birth, or to another location within their birth country for those who moved abroad, for short periods during or at the end of their working life (return migration), but the majority of their working life was spent in a different location to their birth. For those artists who engaged in repeat migration, the location(s) moved to after the initial place was either in the same country (internal) or abroad (external), or a combination of both (internal and external or vice versa).
The period of time covered by temporary mobility varies from a few months to a few years, depending on the nature of the temporary mobility undertaken. Only short-term movements interpreted as being art-related were taken into consideration – it is assumed only significant art-related movement would be recorded in used sources. The short-term movements selected can be divided into one of the following two categories: ‘study/training’ – attending art schools/academies, training in other artists’ ateliers, studying ‘Old Masters’ paintings in museums, and training scholarships such as the Prix de Rome; and ‘work-related’ – commissions, exhibitions, working with other artists, sources of inspiration and picturesque/scenic views. Artists who moved to a location to become a professor in an art academy can be viewed as work-related mobility, but this type of movement is defined as long-term movement as opposed to temporary mobility because it is assumed that those artists who undertook such movement, of which there are two, left their existing work location to go and work in a new location on a permanent basis. Thus, temporary mobility differs from long-term movement because the artist returns to the location that was at the time he or she undertook such movement their main place of work, whereas he or she moves to a new location to live and work when they engage in long-term mobility.
Artists who undertook both internal and external long-term movement (repeat migrants) are classified as one or the other according to where they spent the larger proportion of their working life.
The ‘primary destinations’ are the chief locations artists who undertook long-term movement migrated to and worked. The primary destination selected for those artists who moved to more than one location (repeat migrants) was the one where he or she spent most of his or her working life.
Three other French artists also moved abroad but this movement took place at the end of their lives: Hippolyte Flandrin (moved to Italy for health reasons), Paul Gauguin (retired to the Marquesas Islands) and Gustave Courbet (fled to Switzerland from Paris in fear of being imprisoned. He planned to return but died unexpectedly from liver disease).
Some artists undertook temporary mobility within their birth country (internal), others went abroad (external-only), and some undertook a combination of both (internal and external short-term movements).
A total of 23 French artists emerge as having undertaken temporary mobility within France.
Murray (2003) attempts to explain the ‘patterns and trajectories of human accomplishment’ using five broad causal factors: peace, prosperity, role models, elite cities and freedom of action. His main emphasis was on explaining the pattern of creativity (scientific and artistic) over time, whereas the focus here is on the geographic spread of visual artistic creativity at certain periods of time. Clearly both approaches overlap and the much broader canvas taken by Murray is a very useful backdrop for the more detailed and specific work that might follow from this article. It is interesting to note that Murray (2003) used some elementary regression analysis to examine his hypotheses. Regression analysis applied to theories where the variables are difficult to define, and even more difficult to measure in any meaningful way, can though give a spurious ‘scientific rigour’ to what in essence have to be explanations based on logical argument, ‘suggestive’ general evidence and case-study type material. Most if not all of the explanatory factors used in this study fall into this category, although future work will attempt to quantify and test for some of the hypotheses.
Apart from the spillovers between artists there are also the spillovers between artists and the rest of the urban economy, a subject matter much researched in the last 20 years (see opening paragraphs and Rushton 2006).
Rallet and Torre (1998) discuss whether in fact the transfer of tacit knowledge requires permanent relocation. They make the point that ‘organisational’ rather than physical proximity may suffice nowadays. Organisational proximity arises from being a member of the same professional community. Such ‘communities’ are characterised by collective value systems, which tend to homogenise individual behaviours in given situations, and lead them to develop common ways to think and solve problems. This collective culture then guarantees that members of the group will spontaneously give the same interpretation to exchanged data or text even if they are located in different places.
Kant (1959, original 1784) also drew attention to this factor, in a more general sense. In relation to rivalry and competition between individuals he states ‘thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity... Without them all the excellent capacities implanted in mankind by nature would slumber eternally undeveloped.’ (p. 26).
Collins (1998) examined this issue also in relation to philosophers. ‘Without philosophical networks and important contemporary rivals, it appears impossible to carry on work at higher levels of metaphysical abstraction’ he states (p. 889). Much of this book in fact deals from a sociological perspective with the issue of clustering of creative activity in philosophy over more than 2,000 years.
It could be argued without much dispute perhaps that Van Gogh’s creativity increased greatly after his permanent move. Likewise for Cezanne and Courbet, mainly because they moved when they were so young (22 and 20 respectively). Many other cases though are not so clear-cut, Whistler being a very good example.
Duccio di Buoninsegna moved from Siena to Florence to receive his training, and he then trained Simone Martini in his workshop in Siena. All of the other artists were from Florence, and they remained there to work after they received their initial training in other Masters’ workshops. An example outside Italy is Ingres, a prominent 18th century French artist, who established a studio in Paris and trained some of the most prominent 19th-century artists – Degas, Morisot and Flandrin.
All of the 13th century Italian artists mentioned previously, except for Duccio di Buoninsegna and Simone Martini, remained concentrated in Florence to work after they received their initial training. Thus, there must have been benefits from being concentrated in the same location.
Many of the prominent Italian artists were employed by different courts in Italy, e.g. Giotto di Bondone and Simone Martini (13th century); Cennino Cennini, Masolino da Panicale, Fra Angelico and Pisanello (14th century); and Francesca della Piero, Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa, Francesco di Giorgio, Donato Bramante, Ercole de’ Roberti and Leonardo da Vinci (15th century). Hall (1998) argues that the Church dominated in terms of patronage. For example, 87 per cent of the 2,000 dated paintings from Italy executed between 1420 and 1539 are religious in subject matter, about half of which are of the Virgin Mary and one-quarter show Christ. Many of these though were funded not only by the Church but also by lay corporations, notably the guilds.
Hall (1998) also places emphasis on the artistic freedom that prevailed in Florence from the 13th to the 15th centuries as a key factor in its prominence, perhaps related to the social upheaval taking place there at this time.
Vaubel (2005) points out, with references, that the hypothesis that the creativity of an era is positively affected by the number of competing states within the same civilisation has been examined by a number researchers in the last 30 years. For example, Elias (1993) states, ‘it is no exaggeration to trace the extraordinary productivity of court music in the territories of the former German empire among other things to... the rivalry for prestige of the many courts and the correspondingly high number of musical posts’ (p. 26).
‘The multiplicity of courts provided many job opportunities for musicians, and, for those with the creative gift to be more than a back-chair fiddler, a reasonably comfortable living’ (Scherer 2004, p. 3). He points out, though, that there were drawbacks; the infelicities of courtly servitude were well recognised by the more talented musicians he argues, and some made conscious decisions to avoid or leave it, including Haydn, for a time, and Handel.
Witness the mass exit of most of the important artists in Germany in the 1930s.
Hall (1998) points out that four major Tuscan sculptors were born in Settignano, a village near Florence with important quarries and hence perhaps a causal connection.
In relation to Amsterdam being the main location in the 16th and 17th centuries for prominent artists, Cowen (2000) states that most of the prominent Dutch artists of this time period were not born in Amsterdam but settled there because of its well-developed art market and economy. Hence, it appears that Amsterdam was able to attract the most prominent artists because it had ‘created’ the right infrastructure. While such provision requires wealth, it does not follow that wealth per se is a sufficient causal factor.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank various people for assistance and/or inspiration in preparing this article, including Tyler Cowen, David Galenson, Peter Johnson, F.M. Scherer, Yvonne Scott, participants at different seminars where the article was presented, in particular at the 14th International Conference of the Association for Cultural Economics, Vienna, July 2006, two anonymous referees and the co-editor Michael Rushton.
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Kelly, E., O’Hagan, J. Geographic clustering of economic activity: The case of prominent western visual artists. J Cult Econ 31, 109–128 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-007-9035-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-007-9035-x