A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the...

For 35 leading painters who worked in France during the first century of modern art, this paper uses illustrations in French textbooks as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings closely resemble those obtained earlier from a similar analysis...

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the...

For 35 leading painters who worked in France during the first century of modern art, this paper uses illustrations in French textbooks as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings closely resemble those obtained earlier from a similar analysis...