ReputationEra
An estimation journey between De Kooning and Klimt
By reputation we mean the economic and cultural value of the artist's figure, which is defined through his positioning in the art market, the number of studies and publications about him and the number of exhibitions.
We want to check the relationship between the estimation of an artist in the economic dimension of the art market and in the cultural dimension of the general public.
Sales of the most important
auction houses
Exhibition records
Editorial publications
Chart 1: Number of auctions for every artist on the dataset.
We initiated our analysis with Willem de Kooning upon encountering the online portal of the foundation dedicated to the artist. This website encompasses comprehensive information regarding the artist's works, sales, exhibitions, bibliographies, and more.
We found 131 exhibitions on the Willem de Kooning Foundation's website, only 81 had catalogues. From BnF and Google Books API, we extracted 31 exhibition records. This suggests that only 39% of catalogued exhibitions and 23% of total exhibitions were covered in our dataset. It's worth noting that the extracted records include exhibitions beyond one-man shows.
Chart 2: De Kooning exhibitions distribution.
Distribution of Exhibition in Foundation data
Distribution of Exhibition in BnF and Google Books API
Now that we know the accuracy and completeness percentage of the open data we have, we can move on to a phase of comparing the research results between Willem De Kooning and Gustav Klimt.
Our analyses focus on the relationship between the number of works sold, price trends, and their averages over the years 2000-2010.
In the common span time (2008-2014) Klimt has seen a diminishing amount of sellings while the inverse can be considered for De Kooning, even though in the last year considered (2014) De Kooning’s sellings were half of those performed in the previous year.
Chart 3: sales trend of the two artists per year.
This may seem like a very complicated graph... let's try to do a treasure hunt to get to know it a little. Try to find these elements using your detective magnifying glass:
Chart 4: Comparison of the two artist average sales prices per year.
The purpose of bibliographic analysis is to consider the trend of publications over time, distinguishing between exhibition catalogs and others.
Chart 5: Numbers of publications per year for the two artists.
We can see how Klimt has a good growth that starts from the end of the 90s until 2018. De Kooning is more distant and with smaller peaks, although he also shows growth from the 2000s onwards.
This section checks how many bibliographic records are actually in the exhibition catalogues. Since no type of publication or genre was specified/extracted from data, we manually recognized exhibition catalogues by extracting specific keywords from the title.
Certainly 2005 was a good year for Klimt exhibitions!
While de Kooning seems to achieve excellent results only 5 years later, in 2011.
Chart 6: Number of exhibitions per year for the two artists.