Measuring masters and masterpieces: French rankings of French painters and paintings from Realism to Surrealism

In 1962, art historian George Kubler remarked that “the modern professional humanist is an academic person who pretends to despise measurement because of its ‘scientific’ nature,” and although the passage of four decades has now produced exceptions to Kubler’s generalization in some disciplines within the humanities, art history is not prominent among them.1 In 1998, for example, curator Robert Rosenblum of New York’s Guggenheim Museum could declare that “I immediately distrust anybody trying to detect patterns … in art.”2