Debunking the Dark Web Sale of the Stolen Lindauer Painting

Popularized by a recent article in Wired magazine, speculation has rapidly spread across the internet about the ad on the dark web for a stolen painting by artist Gottfried Lindauer. Many have suggested the photo of the painting in the ad is photoshopped. I decided to end the speculation and prove it is a composite by tracking down the original photos.

Using free reverse image search technology available to everyone, I searched for the source image of the painting and then the source image of the frame/wall. Once I located the images, I analyzed them using resemble.js, the same image-matching tool I used to help predict the value of a Kandinsky painting recently sold at auction.

The infographic below outlines all the components of the composite, as well as their sources and the results of the image matching.

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Art and Death. How Many Paintings Could Jackson Pollock Have Made?

This month marks the 62nd anniversary of the untimely passing of one of America’s most creative and important artists, Jackson Pollock. He painted a total of 363 paintings in his short 44 years of life. The circumstances around his death were tragic and are widely known, in part, thanks to the Hollywood movie Pollock. What is less talked about is how many paintings he would have left this world with had he been able to get help with his struggle with alcohol and depression and lived a full life. 

According to data from the CDC on estimated life expectancy at birth, males born in the United States in 1912 lived to an average age of 51.9 years. Pollock passed away at the age of 44, so this would suggest he missed out on 8 years. This average felt low to me, so I decided to look at the other men in the Pollock family to better understand Jackson’s lifespan, had he not battled alcohol and depression. Using Ancestry.com, I built out an abbreviated Pollock family tree. On average,  Jackson's brothers, uncles, and grandfathers, lived to an average age of 70 years old. This would suggest Jackson more likely missed out on 26 years of life. How many of those years could/would he have painted?

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To estimate this, we looked at the age when an artist created their last catalogued work and their age at death for 43 artists.

Source: Artnome Database and Rafe statfeld


Almost all the artists we looked at made artwork right up to the year they passed away, despite the often difficult circumstances that come with aging. There were a handful of exceptions.

Artists who lived to be 90 or more, Joan Miró (90), Balthus (92), and O'Keefe (98), all stopped working a few years before they passed away.  

Joan Miró, April 20, 1893 to 25 December 1983. He lived to be 90 years of age.

Joan Miró, April 20, 1893 to 25 December 1983. He lived to be 90 years of age.

Balthus, February 29, 1908 to February 18, 2001. He lived to be 92 years old.

Balthus, February 29, 1908 to February 18, 2001. He lived to be 92 years old.

Georgia O'Keefe, November 15, 1887 to March 6, 1986. She lived to be 98 years of age.

Georgia O'Keefe, November 15, 1887 to March 6, 1986. She lived to be 98 years of age.

In general, artists chose to paint until they could paint no more. Mary Cassatt was diagnosed with diabetes, rheumatism, and neuralgia in 1911, and she continued to paint until nearly blind from cataracts in 1914. She lived another 12 years unable to create new work.

Mary Cassatt Mother Holding Her Nude Baby Whose Left Hand Rests on the Mother's Chest, 1914. Pastel on Paper, 76.2 x 64.77 cm

Mary Cassatt Mother Holding Her Nude Baby Whose Left Hand Rests on the Mother's Chest, 1914. Pastel on Paper, 76.2 x 64.77 cm

Starting in 1929, Alexej Jawlensky had increasingly severe arthritis that reduced his ability to paint, eventually causing him to stop all together in 1937.

Alexej von Jawlensky Selbstbildnis (self-portrait), 1930. Oil on cardboard, 51.5 x 50.5 cm 

Alexej von Jawlensky Selbstbildnis (self-portrait), 1930. Oil on cardboard, 51.5 x 50.5 cm 

Alexej von Jawlensky Grosse Meditation: Im Dickicht, 1937. Oil on paper, 24.8 × 19.3 cm  

Alexej von Jawlensky Grosse Meditation: Im Dickicht, 1937. Oil on paper, 24.8 × 19.3 cm  

Shortly before his death, Arthur Dove was paralyzed by a stroke. With the help of his wife, the artist Helen Torr, Dove continued to paint by having her guide his hand.

Artist Helen Torr assisted her husband Arthur Dove in painting by guiding his hand after he suffered from paralysis.

Artist Helen Torr assisted her husband Arthur Dove in painting by guiding his hand after he suffered from paralysis.

A pattern begins to appear where artists turn to and not away from art when facing aging, sickness, and tragedy. One of the most extreme and heart-wrenching examples is the artist Egon Schiele. Schiele drew the sketch below of his wife Edith, six months pregnant, on her deathbed, just days before he himself died. All three succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic.

Egon Schiele, Edith, October, 28th 1918.

Egon Schiele, Edith, October, 28th 1918.

On a lighter note, there is James Ensor, the outlier of the group, who stopped painting not due to illness, but in favor of playing free-style harmonium jam sessions for his friends (he did not have any formal training).

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James Ensor, Ensor in his studio (Ensor at the harmonium), 1933. Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

James Ensor, Ensor in his studio (Ensor at the harmonium), 1933. Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

Those artists were the exceptions. For every artist that stopped three or four years before passing away, there were many who painted right up to the year they died. Not to diminish the significant negative impact of these illnesses, I think we can assume that if Pollock had successfully managed depression and alcohol, he would have also continued to paint to our predicted age of 70.

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Using the Artnome database, we can see that Pollock averaged 14.5 paintings per year. If we assume he lived an additional 26 years, at that average output, he would have created an additional 377 paintings. This would leave us with 740 paintings, or more than double the 363 we have today.

To further test this, I looked at Edvard Munch, who died at age 80, and Lee Krasner, who died at age 75, to see what percent of their work they created after turning 44. 

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Roughly 1,053 of Munch's 1,850 paintings (57%) were created after he turned 44 and before he passed away at 80. If you narrow it to the years between 44 years old and 70, it is 983 paintings, or about 53% of Munch's work.    

*Note Krasner data includes all artworks and is not limited to "Paintings".

*Note Krasner data includes all artworks and is not limited to "Paintings".

356 of Krasner's 600 artworks (59%) were created between the age of 44 and her passing away at age 75.

While this is only a sample of two artists, it suggests that my projection for Pollock could be right. Other artists more than doubled their total output after the age of 44.

Why do this analysis? I think there is potential for a whole new area of study on the impact of life events on the productivity of artists. How, say, would the birth of a child, a marriage, or a death in the family impact artistic production in terms of quality, quantity, and content? What about macro-influencers such as war, plague, famine, recession? How do these impact individual artistic output? These are just some of the many questions I hope to dive deeper into with future blog posts.

A final note: perhaps this seems a morbid use of data to some, but I hope not. I found researching and writing this blog post to be a great reminder of what a fantastic wellspring the creation and analysis of art is:  a lens for us to continually explore and discover our physical and emotional worlds, captivating us into our final days, and helping us come to terms with our own mortality. If anything, it inspires me to take up the brush again; what a gift to never be bored, to always be driven to create, to have a filter for coping with the best and worst life can throw at you, to die wanting to create just one more painting. As Hippocrates (and then later Van Gogh) said: "Ars longa, vita brevis"”: "Art is long, life is short".   

I'd like to thank my friend Rafe Statfeld for his invaluable expertise and support in doing research for this blog post. He has become my go-to expert for all questions on catalogue raisonné.

Do you have an idea for interesting analysis or are you interested in collaborating on a blog post? Email me at jason@artnome.com, or better yet, join the Artnome community of 100+ experts in art history, economics, data science, computer science. 

Moneyball for Art (and Pollock's tallest painting)

 
 

I went to the Harvard Fogg Art museum yesterday, one of my favorite museums just a few blocks away from my office in Harvard Square. A particularly tall painting by Jackson Pollock from 1950 titled Number 2 caught my eye. I took out my phone, searched the custom art database I spent the last 3 years building, and discovered it is, in fact, Pollock’s tallest painting at 287x91.4 cm. Harvard may or may not already know they have the tallest Pollock painting (it was not listed on the label), but I wonder if they know that it is more than twice the height of an average Pollock (86.67 x 99.81 cm.) ? That Pollock averaged 14.5 paintings per year, but the year he painted Number 2, he painted 56 paintings? My guess is they probably don't know all of that. Here's why.

We have over 550 art museums, 400+ collegiate art history programs, and the global art market does $60B+ in annual sales with individual works selling for more than one hundred million dollars... yet we lack good data and analytical tools for art. Even Google Search can’t answer the most basic questions about how many works our most important artists have made. Instead this information (when available) is locked inside rare, expensive, out-of-print, controversial, printed books called catalogues raisonnés .

What’s the impact of not having up to date and easily accessible data? Popular estimates say up to 20% of works in museums and galleries are either forged or misattributed often supported with fake documentation. Frustrated by how little we know about our most important cultural works, and how art history is being rewritten by forgers, I decided to create the Artnome database.

I have a vision where we use quantitative language to describe artworks in the same way as in business and sports. We don’t simply say Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors is “really good”. We say things like Curry has a .438 three point shooting percentage, the best of any active player. Why get so nuanced in our analysis? We measure and quantify the things we care about to better understand them, deepen our enjoyment of them, to tell better stories around them, and to make better decisions and investments.

By combining information from catalogues raisonnés, auctions, and exhibitions, we can tap into new cultural context and build sophisticated market intelligence for art. With a complete view of an artist's work, we are able to create sports-style statistics highlighting the elements that make artists and their work unique.

Below are sample analytics for Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock from the database.

Although both artists lived short lives (Pollock died at 44 and Van Gogh at 37), Van Gogh produced more than twice the number of paintings of Pollock.  

This is especially impressive when considering Van Gogh was active as a painter just nine years vs Pollock's 25 years of activity.

In those short nine years, Van Gogh averaged 96 paintings a year, roughly a painting every four days.  Pollock averaged just 14.5 paintings a year.

Pollock's total number of paintings created may have been less than half the number of Van Gogh, but at 506 square yards (a little over a third the area of an Olympic swimming pool) Pollock beats out Van Gogh's 322 square yards for total surface area painted.  

Pollock managed to paint more surface area than Van Gogh (despite creating fewer paintings) by creating work in much larger dimensions. It would make sense that Van Gogh's canvases were smaller, as he often painted on-site directly from observation, which would require the transport of the canvas. 

Van Gogh's canvases also generally adhere to the French standard sizes for oil paintings as dictated by the arts materials suppliers of the day. When charting the width and height of all works by both artists, it is easier to see the contrast in size and variability. 

The premise of Moneyball is that the collective wisdom of baseball insiders was subjective, potentially flawed, and could be taken advantage of using better analytics.  Might we be able to build a better art collection for less money with more advanced analytics?

If we look at auction data we can establish an average cost per painting sold at auction and an average cost per square centimeter based on total surface area of the works sold.

We can then multiply these average prices against the total number of paintings created and the total area painted to establish a range of values for the artist's complete works. In this case Van Gogh's complete paintings are estimated in a range roughly triple the complete works of Pollock. Does this seem right to you? If you believed Pollock to be the better artist, you might see this as a sign that the market undervalues his work. 

One theory I have is that artists with a very high output, (for example, Alexej Jawlensky, who produced 2,158 paintings), will have value ranges that that far exceed equally or better-known artists with significantly fewer works (Barnet Newman, for example, with 141 paintings). Now imagine you could establish a league average by creating predictive value ranges for the complete works of 50 to 100 of the best-known artists. Could that type of statistic, albeit in need of refinement, lead to a potential market correction through a better understanding of relative supply? More on that in the next post which will dig deeper into financial metrics including ratio of works created to works sold, works in private vs public hands, and the correlation between size, year created, and sale price at auction.

Interested in getting your hands on some data or helping us to build the largest database of known works across the world's most important artists? Join the free Artnome Slack community.