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The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity
Princeton University Press
December 2006
252 pages ISBN: 0691121095 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction | Historical
When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest
art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout
decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or
do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through
meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their
lives? By examining the careers not only of great painters but also
of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie
directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound
new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range
of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two
fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that
each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over
a lifetime. Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive
at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In
contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by
formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson
shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne,
Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred
Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer,
van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia
Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He
also explains how this changes our understanding of art and
its past. Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators
find. By illuminating the differences between them, this
pioneering book provides vivid new insights into the
mysterious processes of human creativity.
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