Was Andy Warhol the 20th Century’s Most Influential Artist?
Measured in words on Wikipedia, Warhol wins hands down. How did he achieve that?
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the world’s art-lovers think Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was the most influential Western artist of the 20th century.
His Wikipedia entry (here) is a massive 18,197 words. That’s longer than for any other 20th-century artist, including Pablo Picasso (12,051 words), Jean-Michel Basquiat (15,858 words) and Frida Kahlo (16,948 words).
Go back in history and he’s ahead of Leonardo da Vinci (15,237 words), Rembrandt (13,918 words) and Paul Cézanne (15,878 words). One of the few artists who beats him is Vincent van Gogh (18,614 words).
The Wiki wordcount is a fair measure of how people across the world who love art and are interested in art view an artist. Important artists have long, detailed entries written by fans, obsessives, critics and other artists, that have been reviewed, corrected and fact-checked to the nth degree. Moreover, longer articles on Wiki are superior, on average, with more people contributing to them, and more review. As one researcher noted, “a very simple metric — word count — can be used as proxy for article quality.”
Long Wiki entries suggest that art-lovers know and care about the artist, whether for or against. Long entries say artists made an impact on the art world. Short entries mean they didn’t.
It’s informative to compare the lengths of Wiki entries on artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. I compiled a list of the top 100 western artists with writeups on Wiki, with a cutoff of about 3000 words.
It turns out there’s a strong age effect — all else being equal, artists born more recently have longer Wiki entries. No wonder: they’re geared up for social media, they write about themselves abundantly, their galleries publicise them, and their fans are more likely to be active on Wiki.
I corrected for the age effect using a standard regression technique. The approach scales up the numbers for earlier artists like Picasso (from 12,051 to 14,539) and lowers them for younger artists like Banksy (from 16,189 to 14,241).
We then get the following graph of the western world’s top WikiWords artists of the 20th century as of February 2024, adjusted by year of birth.
The overall results make sense. Most artists on the list are well known and respected by critics, and their works sell for hefty sums. Of the first 10 names on the list, Warhol, Kahlo, Basquiat, Picasso and Rothko have all had one or more Megasales, defined as the sale of a single work of art for $40 million or more in 2024 prices.
There are a fair number of younger artists on the WikiWords list who have strong followings and are increasingly being recognised, like Tracey Emin, Banksy and Félix González-Torres. Some of them are likely to have Megasales in a decade or two.
Moreover, the list is reassuringly diverse. It goes from Pop Art (Warhol, Koons) to Surrealism (Kahlo, Dalí), Abstract Expressionism (Rothko, Klee) to street art (Banksy, Basquiat), and includes photography (Arbus, Adams) and sculpture (Calder, Bourgeois). There are 6 women in the top 25, which isn’t enough, but is far more than one would have found on a comparable list a century ago.
And the artists are geographically spread out across the major western countries, led by 9 born in the USA (4 others became American, like Duchamp and Rothko), 4 born in France, 3 born in the UK (assuming Bansky was born there), and 2 each from Spain and Germany.
The most dramatic feature of the list is that Warhol is comfortably in the lead, followed by Kahlo and Dalí. Picasso is only 7th. Could it be that Warhol has more to say to modern artists — and to modern art viewers — than Picasso?
The big qualification is that Wikipedia has a strong Western, English-speaking bias. Warhol has only 7161 words on French Wiki, while Marcel Duchamp has 11,171 words and Picasso 12,508 words. Hmmm, let’s think about that. Picasso, maybe. Duchamp, nah. The French nationalists are wrong this time. Ideally, though, it would be useful to take non-English Wikis into account.
In Megasales terms, Picasso is the top 20th century artist, with 32 of his works having sold for more than $40 m by March 2024. Through his long career he pioneered artistic movements like Cubism and Expressionism, created iconic artworks and influenced generations of artists, writers and filmmakers.
His biggest sale ever, adjusting for inflation, was Les Femmes d’Alger (‘Version O’), one of a series of 15 paintings of Women of Algiers, dating from 1954–55. It sold for $179.4 million in May 2015, equivalent to $221.4 million in January 2024.
Andy Warhol is second on the 20th century Megasales list, with 23 entries. His top auction entry is Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe 40 inches (101.6 cm) square, silkscreened with a sage blue background, dating from 1964. It sold for $195 million in May 2022, equivalent to $207 million in January 2024. It is, of course, an iconic image in art history, and a cornerstone of Pop Art. Everybody recognises it.
Before the auction, Alan Rotter from Christie’s described it as “The most significant painting to come to auction in a generation. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn is the absolute pinnacle of American Pop and the promise of the American Dream, encapsulating optimism, fragility, celebrity and iconography all at once … Standing alongside Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon, Warhol’s Marilyn is categorically one of the greatest paintings of all time …”
That’s a tad extreme, but you get the idea.
The next biggest 20th century artists in terms of Megasales are Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon, with 22 entries each, and Jean-Michel Basquiat on 12. Bacon ranks only 28th on the WikiWords list, suggesting that his screaming popes, distorted abstract figures and raw emotion somehow lack mass appeal.
Andy Warhol?? He’s sometimes viewed as a talented dabbler who played around with photos of Marilyn, JFK and Campbell Soup. Is he really in the same league as Picasso, Kahlo, Matisse and Pollock?
Yes. He’s a superstar for good reason. He was important, above all, for his ideas and vision. Like all influential artists, he viewed and imagined the world differently.
Think of Vincent van Gogh. Before him, nobody had ever painted screamy starry skies:
or withered sunflowers pounding with light and movement:
or wheatfields oozing with character like a Rembrandt portrait:
Van Gogh provided a fresh perspective on the world. His bold colours, thick paint and energetic brushwork expressed emotion and ideas in a unique way. After him, art could never be the same. He’s had legions of imitators, most of which are pale and disappointing. No wonder his works sell for such stupendous prices.
Van Gogh has had 17 Megasales thus far, and counting. Not bad for an artist who sold only a few paintings during his lifetime!
Warhol also looked at the world differently. Before him, nobody had found beauty in everyday household items like soup cans in such intimate detail:
or produced repeated perspectives on famous people, aided by technology:
or used news photographs (e.g. of car crashes) as the basis of elaborate, imaginative silkscreens:
Like them or not, these three innovations have become key components in the repertoire of modern artists. They all go back to Warhol.
Van Gogh produced his greatest work over just three years, 1888–1890, which is gobsmacking. Warhol’s most original and inspiring year was 1962, when he produced the first Marilyns and Campbell Soups, but he went on to make new work and produce novel ideas until his death in 1987. He was the driving force behind Pop Art, an art of American consumerism and popular culture that fitted the mood of the 1960s. His vision was huge and new.
David Galenson, an economist from the University of Chicago, has thought about these issues a great deal. He says that the remarkable creativity of great artists can be analysed in terms of two artistic extremes. At one extreme is the Experimental innovator: the artist who refines their skill and execution throughout their lives, aiming to produce better and more profound work as they get older. Think Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cezanne or Kandinsky. They work slowly, they struggle to finish pieces, they revise and repaint. They usually operate within one artistic style.
At the other extreme is the Conceptual innovator: the artist who has new and clever ideas, destroys the rules, produces breathtakingly original insights. Masaccio (1401–1428), one of the inventors of perspective, was an innovator. Raphael. The Impressionists, of course, and Van Gogh. Picasso and Warhol. They worked fast, had no problem finishing pieces and moving on, often didn’t revise or rethink works, and changed style easily.
Galenson says Conceptualists tend to reach their peak at younger ages than Experimenters, their careers are generally shorter, and they’re often known for one or two novel works / ideas. Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985), for example, produced Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, in 1936, when she was 23. (Known in English as Breakfast in Fur.) It was a stunningly original piece, driven by a delightful idea rather than decades of skill and practice. She was active and productive for another five decades, but never again caught the popular imagination. She’s famous mostly for Object, and that alone.
Ideas come first with Conceptual art. Oppenheim did not need great skill to glue fur onto cup, saucer and spoon. Object is valuable because she was the first to do it. Later objects along the same lines would be worthless.
That’s why Warhol’s first Marilyns are the super-valuable ones. The idea is (almost) everything with Conceptual art. Execution is often secondary. Conceptual artists like Warhol and Damian Hirst could tell assistants what to do, yet sign the works themselves. They had the idea.
By contrast, execution and skill are crucial to Experimenters. Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Cezanne produced much of their best work in old age, when they were the most skilled and their understanding of their art had developed the most. Michelangelo and Rembrandt mobilised assistants to paint the boring backgrounds of paintings, but would never have told them how to paint the faces and hands of their subjects, then signed the work. Only they could carry out the crucial elements of their visions.
Picasso was a Conceptualist who continued to produce new ideas, creating a mountain of original work over his long lifetime. In each of his many phases — the Blue Period, Cubism, Surrealism, War etc. — he pushed art in new and often thrilling directions. He was also a skilled draughtsman and painter, though, who didn’t use assistants. Perhaps he is best described as a Conceptual Experimenter, whose biggest impact was as Conceptualist rather than Experimenter? Much the same might be said of Matisse.
And of Andy Warhol. He churned out new ideas relentlessly and experimented with new techniques. He invented Pop Art almost single-handedly in 1962, and once he found his groove he kept going with innovative works of all kinds. But let’s not forget that he was a successful commercial artist who worked for magazines like Glamour and Vogue, and had honed his skills in producing visuals that were easily recognizable and memorable. He was a skilful artist who knew exactly what he was doing.
He’s had a host of imitators, but most of them look like sad pastiches of the real thing. Warhol wins again.
That said, Warhol’s biggest years were 1962–64. 18 of his 23 Megasales date from this supremely influential period in his mid-30s.
By contrast, Picasso has 6 Megasales from 1901–05 (his Blue and Rose periods), 12 from 1932 (a year of magnificently original Surrealist-type and dreamlike works), 5 from 1937–41, and the others spread out over his career. His ideas and imagination were prodigious, and were distributed in three distinct clumps across his career. He was still producing splendid works in his 60s, supporting the notion that he was a Conceptual Experimenter, as noted earlier.
A key measure of artistic importance is the influence artists have on later artists. This is where Warhol hits the spot. Galenson documents how he influenced prominent modern artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Naumann, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Anselm Kiefer, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst and Al Weiwei. Plus Basquiat and Koons, of course, already mentioned.
Galenson reckons the true source of importance is “an artist’s influence on the discipline,” and in these terms, Warhol is without peer.
Andy Warhol is undoubtedly the most influential artist since 1950, and possibly since 1900. Is he the greatest?
I am not convinced.
I don’t see the same profound insight in his works that I find in the best of Picasso, Pollock, Miro, Gerhard Richter or William Kentridge. You see a Warhol, you get the point. That is the point. The surface is the message. I don’t get new insights from viewing Marilyn the third, fifth or 10th time.
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889) can be viewed again and again. In my experience, Warhol’s Flowers (1964) can’t.
But maybe that’s not the point. Andy Warhol was a visionary and a magnificent self-marketer. He invented new art forms and expanded the definition of art. His ideas and experiments from 1962–64 still reverberate. Almost all modern artists have been influenced by him, whether they like it or not.
Blake Gopnik, the American arts writer and author of a massive 962-page biography (Warhol, 2020) puts it this way: “It’s looking more and more like Warhol has overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the twentieth century. Or at least the two of them share a spot on the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.”
That’s probably right. Picasso and Warhol stand shoulder to shoulder on that artistic summit.
Hold on! Perhaps we’re being parochial. What about Walt Disney? He never pretended to be an artist, and had an amazing commercial career instead. But … he was a skilful artist and cartoonist, he pushed the boundaries of animation in many clever ways, he was a visionary artistic leader and influenced modern popular culture more than anybody else.
He won twenty-two competitive Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations. I doubt we’ll ever see that again!
Viewed in a broad sense, it can be argued that Disney was the most influential artist of the 20th century, because he was the most commercially successful artist ever.
© TM at H&W (2024). All rights reserved.
Methodology and References
WikiWords: The length of Wiki entries changes by the day. The numbers were extracted from artist entries on Wiki in the week of 20–27 February 2024, including references and external links but excluding Authority Control databases.
Megasales: Top-selling prices of works by 20th-century artists were extracted from an art database, complemented by estimates of the sales prices of non-auctioned works from Wiki, theartwolf and single artist internet searches. I included all works by artists and sculptors that have sold for at least $40 million, measured in real January 2024 prices, with earlier numbers adjusted by the US Consumer Price Index. 20th-century artists as defined earlier have 207 entries on the list.
The Wiki researcher is Joshua Blumenstock, ‘Automatically Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles,’ UCB iSchool Report 2008–021. See also Eduard Petiška, Aleš Kuběna & Michal Dressler, ‘What does the data analysis of 7,048 environmental articles tell us about the perception of Wikipedia’s quality?’ DOI 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3830157/v1, Jan. 2024, for a recent case-study that reaches a similar conclusion.
The Alex Rotter quote is from Daniela Neri, ‘Warhol’s Marilyn at Auction with $200m Estimate,’ https://www.barnebys.co.uk/blog/warhols-marilyn-at-auction-with-200m-estimate 27 March 2022.
David Galenson has discussed artistic creativity in many works, including his book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (2006). He discusses Warhol’s importance in his paper, ‘Revising the Canon: How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist,’ University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, Working Paper №2021–14.
