ABSTRACT
Robert Storr, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, recently declared that an artist’s success “is completely unquantifiable.”1 By studying a key group of painters – those who invented and first developed modern art – this chapter shows that quantitative measures not only can produce informative rankings of the relative importance of both painters and paintings, but furthermore can be used to highlight an important difference in approach among major modern artists that has significant implications for our understanding of their careers and their accomplishments. The analysis of this chapter consequently demonstrates that artistic success can be quantified, and that doing so enriches our understanding of the evolution of modern art.
