One of the many injustices of creative work
is that talent does not always lead to success.
The world of art is by no means a meritocracy.
That's why you see work valued for millions that you
think you could do yourself.
And that's why plenty of super talented artists
never get the attention or reward they deserve.
But just because you don't get your due right now
doesn't mean it's never going to come.
And just because you're famous right now
doesn't mean the rug isn't going to get pulled out
from under you.
I have proof.
You may have heard of the 17th century Italian Baroque
artist, Artemesia Gentileschi.
But if you'd been born a century earlier,
you probably wouldn't have.
If you take a look at the Google Books Ngram viewer
and enter her name, you can see a graph
that charts how often her name appears in English language
books between a set of years.
This tool analyzes a database of over five million books
and allows you to chart the frequency
of any set of comma delimited search strings.
If the search term is found in 40 or more books,
then the frequency is plotted on a graph
and the data is normalized by the number of books
published in each year.
You can also filter by language and see
that in her home country of Italy,
there is a much better chance you'd have heard of her
a century ago.
Now, this tool certainly has its flaws,
including faulty optical character recognition.
But Google claims it's relatively
reliable from 1800 onward.
And we're going to work from that assumption,
because the holy grail for any artist
is not just selling art and having shows,
but being written about.
Exhibitions are up for only a handful of months
in just one location.
But a published review or a mention online
or in an actual printed book can live forever.
And since we are all bound by space and time,
the printed and digitized record is
critical to our understanding of what's going on today
and what has happened in the past.
So when we look at Gentileschi's chart in English language
books from 1800 on, we can see relatively few instances
of her being mentioned for a good long time.
Gentileschi was firmly in the grave by this point,
but in her day, she'd been a remarkably well-known painter,
when few women were encouraged or even
permitted to become an artist.
She was a follower of the mighty Caravaggio, whom you really
shouldn't chart in comparison, because it's depressing.
But Caravaggio made large scale paintings of dramatic moments
set in high contrast.
Like this one of the biblical story of Judith
beheading Holofernes.
Gentileschi painted this story, too,
in a manner some consider more masterful than Caravaggio.
Her composition is remarkably dynamic.
The scene horrifically lifelike.
Caravaggio's Judith is delicate and unsure.
Gentileschi's is powerful and determined.
Gentileschi's father, Erazzio, taught her to paint.
He was a respected enough artist of his time, who also covered
the Judith scene, but in a way I think we can all
agree is less exciting.
And you know what?
You can charge him alongside Artemesia,
because it's much less of a downer.
Anyway, when he felt he could teach her no more,
he assigned her a tutor, who ended up raping her.
She took the tutor to court and became embroiled
in a prolonged court battle that made her famous,
but not in a good way.
She persisted.
And eventually became the first woman
to be admitted to the Academy of Art in Florence.
But while she did relatively well at the time,
for centuries after, her work was often attributed to men,
and she was largely left out of the histories
of Italian art of the time.
But now, we talk about her.
Starting in the 1960s, we see a sharp rise in her appearance
in books, which we can credit to the feminist critique of art
history that began happening around that time.
Historians started to take another look
at the art historical canon, that elite club of artists
who have passed from hopeful humans tinkering around
in their studios to the geniuses worthy of our adoration.
The perfect storm of second wave feminism, the civil rights
movement, and the Chicano and gay rights movements,
provided the conditions for people
to wonder more vocally why there seemed
to be only white male artists in art history books.
Linda Laughlin wrote an essay in 1971,
that you should really read, which
explores the question why have there
been no great women artists.
She talks about the assumptions we make about how art gets made
and by whom, saying, "These assumptions,
conscious or unconscious, link together
such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and Van
Gogh, Raphael, and Jackson Pollock,
under the rubric of great, an honorific attested to
by the number of scholarly monographs devoted
to the artist in question.
And the great artist is, of course, conceived of as one
who has genius.
Genius, in turn, is thought of as
an atemporal and mysterious power, somehow embedded
in the person of the great artist".
With this in mind, we're led to ask what the conditions were
of Gentileschi's time that limited her own career,
but allowed Caravaggio to rise to the designation of genius.
Laughlin argues that a dispassionate, impersonal,
sociological, and institutionally oriented
approach would reveal the entire romantic, elitist,
individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing
substructure which the profession of art history
is based.
And which has only recently been called into question by a group
of younger dissidents.
These younger dissidents resurrected
and rediscovered the work of a number of artists.
Flemish still-life painter Clara Peeters
saw a similar resurgence.
As did Dutch artist Judith Leyster,
whose name languished in obscurity for ages,
until a painting attributed to Franz Hals
was acquired by the Louvre in 1893
and found to have her initials.
She dipped again until the 1960s.
Art historians of the 1960s and '70s
brought a number of living artists into the limelight,
as well.
Notably the women artists of abstract expressionism,
many of whom were still making work when
people started taking notice.
Jackson Pollock's long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner,
was a gifted artist long before the two met.
In the 1930s, she studied under famed abstractionist Hans
Hoffman, who supposedly described
her work once as, quote, so good you would not know
that it was done by a woman.
That was a compliment.
Krasner was barely mentioned at all
until Pollock's death in 1956 gave her a bump in notoriety.
But it was in those golden '70s that her name began
to find its place in art news and art history,
leading her to say in 1973, "It's
too bad that women's liberation didn't occur
30 years earlier in my life."
Under-recognized black artists began
to see increased attention at this time, as well.
The artists you see graphed here had
been making art for some time without enormous attention,
when the trend starts to move upward.
Jacob Lawrence began his career in the 1930s
and did receive attention for his migration series
in the '40s, but it was in 1960 that his first museum
retrospective came.
Master collagist Romare Bearden saw a similar surge
of recognition in the '60s and actively worked
to create exhibition opportunities for others.
Photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks
charts a similar trajectory.
Black artists and collectives played active roles
in the social and political change underway.
And throughout the '80s and '90s,
we saw a surge in the number of exhibitions and books
focusing on African-American art.
And a growing interest across fields in both identity
politics and the experience of marginalized groups.
But again, it's all relative when
you bring in a name like Andy Warhol
to put it in perspective.
But these shifts are still meaningful and measurable.
And as you can see, if you look at the trajectories
of some artists, fame doesn't last forever.
Godfrey Kneller, who I've never heard of before today,
was a German-born portrait painter
well-known in Europe in the 17th century, who was still
super popular in 1800.
But his notoriety has steadily declined.
And Artemesia is just barely eking him out.
Of course, much has changed since our charting
stops in 2008.
How we can read and understand the analytics
the internet has to offer us is still largely up in the air.
Google Trends is starting to do this,
but it is much better at showing us
which artists has sold at auction in a given week
than it does reflect major movements.
But I'm hopeful that will change with more time and more
sophisticated and customizable tools.
After you take your own deep dive into the Google Ngram
viewer, charting the great names of your field,
I challenge you to see genius as anything
other than an idea we bestow upon others.
Not something they are or have inside,
but something we make of them.
Genius emerges as the most fickle and ephemeral of things.
Unfairly and inconsistently doled out
to a shifting cast of characters.
What the Google Ngram allows us, in a limited way,
is a glimpse into our own roles in the writing and rewriting
of histories.
What we write about, what we pay attention to,
and what we search for, matters.
I'd argue that we're writing and rewriting
the canon in all of our fields with everything we do
and post and comment upon.
What are the conditions of right now that are making
possible our bold-faced names?
Who is trending and why?
And who is toiling away in obscurity
that future generations might resurrect?
The Great American Read is a new series
on PBS about our most beloved books and why we love to read.
And it leads up to a nationwide vote
on America's favorite novel.
Head to PBS.org/GreatAmericanRead
to vote for your favorite book today.
Check the link in the description for more details.
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