What the Dog Saw

Here is an excerpt from "What the Dog Saw," a collection of short essays by Malcolm Gladwell.  The story is entitled "Late Bloomers: why do we equate genius with precocity?" The story can be found on page 295.

Picasso was the incandescent prodigy.  His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas, produced at age 20.  In short order, he painted many of the greatest work of his career - including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, at age of twenty-six.  Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

Cezanne didn't.  If you go to the Cezanne room at the Musee d'Orsay, in Paris - the finest collection of Cezannes in the world - the array of masterpieces you'll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career.

The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cezanne.  He was a late bloomer - and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cezannes of the world.

...Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in open-ended exploration.  They tend to be "conceptual," Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and they execute it.  "I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research," Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas.  "In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting.  To find is the thing."  He continued, "the several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting... I have never made trials or experiments."


But late bloomers tend to work the other way around.  Their approach is experimental.  "Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental," Galenson writes in "Old Masters and Young Geniuses," and he goes on:

The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective.  These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error.  Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting.  They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings.  Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods.  These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cezanne said the opposite:  "I seek in painting."

When Cezanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure.  (The result is one of the string of mastgerpieces in the Musee d'Orsay.)  When Cezanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on 150 occasions - before abandoning the portrait.  He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again.  He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way.  Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain's trial-and-error method:  "His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinariloy soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again."

Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on Huckleberry Finn so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete.  The Cezannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition. 

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Are you a Picasso?  or are you a Cezanne?   Are you a conceptual person?  Conceptual people know there is a specific way their art is to be presented, (whether it's writing, painting, etc) and strive to "find" that answer.  Or are you an experimental person, where you have a vague idea that you play around with forever yet you're rarely, if ever, satisfied?

What do I seem like?