Top 50 most influential artists — exploratory analysis
In this article, I will do an exploratory analysis of the data available in Kaggle on the 50 most influential artists.
Features:
These are the dataframe features:
- Name: artist name;
- Years: year of birth and death of the artist;
- Genre: genre of art produced;
- Bio: small biography of the artist;
- Wikipedia: Wikipedia link about the artist;
- Paintings: number of influential works produced by the artist (does not contain all the paintings produced).
I will find the answer to the following questions:
- How many influential artworks each artist produced on average;
- Which artist has produced more influential artworks and which has produced less;
- Which country do these artists come from;
- Which genre of art is most common among the most influential artists;
- Which century was the cradle for the most influential artists.
Describing the data
I’m first going to import the libraries and the CSV file downloaded on Kaggle.
We can see that the data frame has 50 rows and 10 columns. The name of the columns are displayed below:
There are a few artists that produced multiple genres of art and with more than one nationality.
Artworks in numbers
Looking at the paintings, we see that on average the artists produced 168 works during their lifetime.
The artist who produced the most has 877 artworks, and the one who produced the least was dedicated to 24 creations.
Let’s see who created more artworks:
Van Gogh has nailed it! He produced 877 artworks. Between them, we can find extraordinary paintings such as Sunflowers, The Bedroom (1888) and Starry Night (1889). His most expensive artwork is the Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which costs $152 million.
He is followed by Edgar Degas, an influential impressionism artist. He produced 702 artworks; the most famous are The Dance Class (1871–1874) and The Absinthe Drinker (1876).
The list is followed by Picasso, Renoir, Dürer and Gauguin.
Let’s take a look now on who created less influential artworks:
We find that the artist with fewer influential artworks is Jackson Pollock, a North-american artist. He’s a reference in abstract expressionism.
He is followed by Delacroix, Seurat, Cezanne and Michelangelo.
The origins of art
Regarding nationality, not surprisingly, the most influential artists are French, Italian or Spanish.
Art styles
When it comes to the art genre, we have a lot of diversity and even artists producing more than one genre:
However, we see that impressionism and post-impressionism are the most influential styles of art.
Impressionism was a movement born from the association of artists from the second half of the 19th century living in France. When it started to reach its limits, Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction. The movement was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat.
Creativity century
As in the column “years” we have both birth and death years, I’m going to create two columns separating this information.
In this list, we can see that the 19th century was flourishing, with 27 influential artists, it’s followed by the 15th century with 7 artists, and the 16th century with 5.
It’s not surprising that a lot of creativity would come out in the 19th century; it was a century of significant social and technological changes produced by the Industrial Revolution. During this period, art was mostly in bourgeois hands with its centre in Paris. It was also a time where social criticism was expressed through paintings.
Conclusion
After this exploratory analysis, we found that the most influential artists were:
- Born in the 19th century, a period distinguished by a lot of social and technological transformations produced by the Industrial Revolution;
- They come from France, where Paris was the Western’s epicentre of art;
- They were mostly creating impressionist, post-impressionist and surrealist artwork;
- Artists were producing 168 influential artworks on average, but Van Gogh went beyond with 877 productions.
Note: This article is an excuse for me to play with data. Unfortunately, this data frame does not contain complete information about the artists.
