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The Reappearing Masterpiece: Ranking AmericanArtists and Art Works of the Late Twentieth CenturyDavid W. Galenson aa National Bureau of Economic Research, University of ChicagoPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

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Abstract. A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern artproduces the startling finding that art scholars consider RobertSmithson’s Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual workmade by an American artist during the past 150 years. More gen-erally, quantifying the evidence of the textbooks reveals the sourceof the pluralism, or stylistic incoherence, of American art since thelate 1960s. A persistently high demand for artistic innovation hasproduced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predom-inated. The art world has consequently been flooded by a series ofnew ideas, often embodied in individual works, usually made byyoung artists who have failed to make more than one significantcontribution in their careers. The monumental Spiral Jetty, madein 1970 by a young artist who was killed soon thereafter while inthe process of making his art, brought together a remarkable num-ber of the central themes of the advanced art of the time and hasbecome a symbol for that art.

Keywords: Judy Chicago, Joseph Kosuth, Maya Lin, RobertSmithson, Spiral Jetty

ate in the summer of 2002, visitors to Rozel Point inGunnison Bay, the north arm of Utah’s Great SaltLake, reported that Spiral Jetty was visible from the

lake’s shore. The artist Robert Smithson had formed the1,500-foot-long jetty in 1970, using two dump trucks, a trac-tor, and a front loader to move more than 6,500 tons of mud,salt crystals, and rock (Smithson 1996, 146; Robins 1984,84–85). Although Smithson recognized that his creationwould be submerged periodically when the lake’s level rose,he may have miscalculated how common this would be, forthe jetty had been hidden almost continuously since 1972.

The reappearance of Spiral Jetty in August of 2002 occa-sioned little excitement. The New York Times did record theevent, but only after the passage of several months and thenonly with fewer than 750 words (Kimmelman 2002). NewYork’s Dia Art Foundation, which now owns Spiral Jetty,did not begin selling tickets for admission to view it, andneither the foundation nor any government authority inUtah undertook to pave the 16 miles of gravel roads that liebetween Utah State Route 83 and the jetty.1

By surveying a large collection of scholarly narratives ofthe history of modern art, this study will demonstrate thatart scholars have implicitly judged Spiral Jetty to be notonly the dominant American work of art of the late twenti-eth century but also the most important individual work pro-duced by an American artist during the past 150 years. Thisstartling finding raises a number of questions. One is: Howcan any work made in 1970, during an era that art historiansinvariably describe as a time of pluralism, attain such aprominent position? Another follows from the events of thepast year. If Spiral Jetty holds such an exalted position inAmerican art history, how can its reemergence have pro-duced so little reaction from the art world?

Quantitative analysis of the history of American art inthe late twentieth century can help to answer these ques-tions by providing a new understanding of the careers andcontributions of the leading artists of the time. More gen-erally, this systematic approach can allow us to perceivethe unifying elements of an era that is usually consideredto be characterized only by disunity. Thus, as in similarstudies of art in other periods, simple quantitative analy-sis serves both to pose and to answer significant newquestions.

Artists and Evidence

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftopsthat he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of thespectator in order that his declarations take a social value andthat, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art His-tory. (Duchamp 1989, 138)

The goal in choosing the artists to be studied here was toselect the most important American artists from the 1960sto the present. This was done by using six textbooks on thehistory of modern art published since 1994 (see appendix).Twenty-five artists who were born between 1930 and 1960and who lived and worked primarily in the United States

The Reappearing Masterpiece Ranking American Artists and Art Works

of the Late Twentieth Century

DAVID W. GALENSONUniversity of Chicago

National Bureau of Economic Research

L

HISTORICAL METHODS, Fall 2005, Volume 38, Number 4Copyright © 2006 Heldref Publications

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had at least one work illustrated in three or more of these sixbooks (see table 1).

Textbooks of art history also provide the evidence analyzedhere. This evidence was drawn from all available books pub-lished in English since 1990 that provide illustrated surveys ofat least the period from 1960 onward. Forty such books werefound (these are listed in the appendix). The data set was cre-ated by listing every reproduction of every work of art shownin these books by all 25 artists in the sample.

A straightforward measure of the importance of a givencontributor or contribution to an intellectual activity is theprobability that the person or work will be discussed in thecourse of scholarly accounts of the history of that disci-pline. Counting the illustrations in these 40 surveys of arthistory to measure the probabilities for the sample membersand their individual works effectively allows us to draw onthe judgments of scores of art scholars concerning whichAmerican artists, and works of art, are considered to havebeen the most important of the period studied here.

Rankings: Artists and Works of Art

Table 2 presents the ranking of artists by total number ofillustrations. Two painters, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella,

head the list. Yet, what is perhaps most striking about thetable is its evidence of the demise of painters as the leadingAmerican artists of recent decades. For after Johns and Stel-la, the next 11 places in the table are held by artists who areknown for work in media other than painting. Eight of these11 artists are younger than Johns and Stella (both of whomare now over 65), and as will be seen subsequently, all madetheir reputations after the two painters. No painter current-ly under the age of 65 has his work illustrated in more than70 percent of the books analyzed.

Table 3 ranks individual works of art by total number ofillustrations. Like table 2, it witnesses the eclipse of paint-ing as the primary source of the advanced art of the latetwentieth century. Only 3 of the top 10 works in table 3 arepaintings, and of these 3—all by Johns—only Flag is a con-ventional painting in form; Three Flags is composed ofthree separate canvases joined together in layers, and Targetwith Plaster Casts has at its top a row of small woodenboxes that contain plaster casts of human body parts. Intable 3 as a whole, only 7 of the 22 works are paintings, andonly 3 of those are by painters other than Johns.

Table 3 also clearly points to the preeminence of very largeworks in this period. Among the five highest-ranked works inthe table, in addition to the 1,500-foot-long Spiral Jetty, Judy

Fall 2005, Volume 38, Number 4 179

TABLE 1. Artists Included in This Study

Year of Year ofArtist birth death

Andre, Carl 1935Basquiat, Jean-Michel 1960 1988Chicago, Judy 1939Christo (Christo Javacheff) 1935Close, Chuck 1940Estes, Richard 1936Fischl, Eric 1948Graves, Nancy 1940 1995Haacke, Hans 1936Halley, Peter 1953Hesse, Eva 1936 1970Holzer, Jenny 1950Johns, Jasper 1930Koons, Jeff 1955Kosuth, Joseph 1945Kruger, Barbara 1945Lin, Maya 1960Nauman, Bruce 1941Schnabel, Julian 1951Serra, Richard 1939Sherman, Cindy 1954Smithson, Robert 1938 1973Stella, Frank 1936Tansey, Mark 1949Turrell, James 1943

Source. See text.

TABLE 2. Ranking of Artists, by Total Number ofIllustrations

Rank Artist No. of illustrations

1 Johns 1082 Stella 733 Smithson 564 Christo 535 Sherman 466 Serra 447 Nauman 438 Hesse 369 Andre 35

10 Kruger 3111 Holzer 3011 Koons 3011 Kosuth 3014 Schnabel 2815 Haacke 2716 Close 2616 Estes 2618 Fischl 2319 Chicago 2120 Basquiat 2021 Graves 1922 Halley 1622 Lin 1624 Turrell 1425 Tansey 8

Source. This and subsequent tables are based on the data setconstructed for this study. See text and appendix for description.

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180 HISTORICAL METHODS

Chicago’s Dinner Party is 48 feet long, Maya Lin’s VietnamVeterans Memorial consists of two wings, each 246 feet long,and Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was 120 feet long. For anoth-er work ranked among the top 10 in table 3, Christo used 6million square feet of polypropylene fabric to surround 11 ofthe small spoil islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with floatingpink skirts for a period of two weeks.

Furthermore, table 3 contains one dramatic and unex-pected fact. Three previous studies have measured the fre-quency with which the major works of the leading Ameri-can artists of their time are reproduced in art historytextbooks for the appropriate periods. One of these studies(Galenson 2005a) found that The Gross Clinic by ThomasEakins was the most-often reproduced work by any Ameri-can artist born during 1830–60, a second (Galenson 2005b)found that Grant Wood’s American Gothic was the compa-rable work by an American artist born during 1860–1900,and a third (Galenson 2002, 119) found that Willem deKooning’s Woman I was the comparable work by an Amer-ican artist born during 1900–40. The astonishing result intable 3 concerns the relative frequency with which SpiralJetty appears in the books surveyed here. The Gross Clinicappears in 70 percent of the books surveyed for that study,American Gothic in 48 percent of the respective texts, andWoman I in just 36 percent of the respective books. Thus,Spiral Jetty, which appears in 93 percent of the books sur-

veyed, is by this measure the most important single work byan American artist during the past 150 years, for it is thework of art most likely to be reproduced in a scholarly nar-rative of the history of American art.

An Era of Incoherence?

Art scholars consistently characterize the American artworld of the 1970s and beyond with the terms pluralism andpostmodernism. These words are effectively the scholars’way of accounting for their difficulty in producing coherentnarratives of the art of the past three decades. One scholar(Robins 1984, 1) observed that “the Pluralism of the seven-ties . . . effectively did away with the idea of dominantstyles for at least a decade,” while another (Fineberg 2000,365) remarked: “Postmodernism is an inclusive aestheticthat cultivates the variety of incoherence.” Although thenumber of artistic movements has proliferated as the num-ber of artists has increased in recent decades, the absence ofdominant styles does not mean that there are no coherenttrends underlying many of the most important artistic devel-opments of the 1960s and subsequent decades. Tables 2 and3 help us to perceive some of these broad trends.

The clear demise of painting from a preeminent positionas the most advanced of the fine arts occurred within theperiod considered here. This was accompanied by the prolif-

TABLE 3. Ranking of Works of Art, by Total Number of Illustrations

No. ofRank illustrations Artist Title Date

1 37 Smithson Spiral Jetty 19702 19 Chicago The Dinner Party 19793 16 Kosuth One and Three Chairs 19653 16 Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial 19823 16 Serra Tilted Arc 19816 13 Johns Three Flags 19587 12 Johns Flag 19558 10 Christo Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay,

Greater Miami, Florida 19838 10 Holzer Installation 19898 10 Johns Target with Plaster Casts 1955

11 8 Johns Painted Bronze 196011 8 Nauman Self-Portrait as a Fountain 197013 7 Christo Running Fence 197613 7 Close Self-Portrait 196813 7 Hesse Hang Up 196613 7 Johns Target with Four Faces 195513 7 Kosuth Art as Idea as Idea 196613 7 Stella Die Fahne Hoch 195919 6 Fischl The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog 198219 6 Haacke Condensation Cube 196519 6 Haacke Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real-Estate

Holdings, a Real-Time Social System,as of May 1, 1971 1971

19 6 Sherman Untitled Film Still 1979

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eration of new hybrid forms of art, a number of which cameto be recognized as new genres in their own right. An exam-ple, of which Spiral Jetty is the prime product, is earthworks;others include anthropometries, assemblages, combines,environments, happenings, installations, and soft sculptures.Yet both the declining importance of painting and theappearance of new hybrid art forms represented a continua-tion of processes that originated much earlier and, in fact,were operating throughout the entire twentieth century.2

When Pablo Picasso invented collage in 1912 andGeorges Braque invented papier collé later the same year,by attaching small pieces of cloth and paper to their can-vases they were not only bringing scraps of waste materi-al into the domain of fine art, they were also violating theintegrity of the flat picture plane that had been respectedby Western painters since the Middle Ages. Their inven-tions initiated a process in which the distinction between(two-dimensional) painting and (three-dimensional)sculpture would progressively be eroded. In 1913, whenMarcel Duchamp first presented unaltered manufacturedobjects as works of art that he called readymades, he wasdefying the tradition that art could be created only by thehand of an artist. This act began a process that under-mined the previously rigid division between fine art andeveryday objects. The late 1950s and early 1960s wit-nessed an intensification of interest both in breaking downthe barriers separating painting from other forms of artand in the use of real objects in the creation of works ofart. Jasper Johns’s use of sculptural and collage elementsin his paintings, Robert Rauschenberg’s use of foundobjects in making his combines, and Andy Warhol’s use ofsilkscreens in making his paintings were strong proximateinfluences on many American artists of the sixties, seven-ties, and eighties who participated in movements that fur-ther advanced those two tendencies.

During the 1960s, another tendency appeared, as a num-ber of leading American artists began to challenge the con-servative role of museums and galleries in the art world inperpetuating traditional forms of art. Some Minimalistartists of the sixties pursued this agenda by bringing intogalleries sculptures made of base materials such as bricks orlead plates. Other artists began to create outdoor sculpturesthat could not be brought into galleries—often because theywere too large, but also in some cases because the artistsdeclared the works to be site-specific and consequentlyvalid only in the particular locations where they were creat-ed and placed.

The trends described above are familiar to students ofmodern art because they are staples in accounts of recentdevelopments. A third trend, however, is much less widelyrecognized, for its importance has only become apparent inlight of recent research on artists’ careers. This third ele-ment is the fact that American art of the seventies, eighties,and nineties has been dominated by conceptual artists. Theconceptual artists in question include not only those of the

Conceptual movement of the late 1960s—Sol LeWitt,Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and others—but alsomore generally those artists who work systematically inexecuting preconceived images or plans in order to produceworks that communicate specific ideas (Galenson 2001).By this broader definition, most leading American artists ofthe 1960s and beyond appear to have worked conceptually.

The significance of this recognition of the conceptualbasis of most of the leading American art of recentdecades goes beyond merely identifying a common prac-tice of these artists. For recent research has found thatconceptual artists tend to make their most significant con-tributions early in their careers. The findings of this studytherefore imply that the most important art of the past fourdecades should be the product of young artists.

Table 4 confirms that this has been the case. The tablelists the 20 most important five-year periods in the careersof the artists in the sample for this study, ranked by thetotal number of textbook illustrations of the given artist’swork in the relevant period. The top 10 periods were allcompleted by the time the respective artists were 35 yearsold; in the entire table, only 2 periods were completedwhen the artist was over 40. Four of the top 10 periods,and 7 of the top 20, were completed before the artistreached the age of 30.3

Another characteristic of conceptual artists’ innova-tions is that they appear suddenly, as the product of a newidea, and are quickly embodied in new work. Consistentwith this, table 4 shows that in 14 of the 20 cases, the five-

Fall 2005, Volume 38, Number 4 181

TABLE 4. Ranking of Five-Year Periods in Careers ofArtists, by Total Number of Illustrations

Illustrations

Rank Artist Dates N % Ages

1 Johns 1955–59 64 59 25–292 Smithson 1967–71 55 98 29–333 Hesse 1966–70 34 94 30–344 Stella 1959–63 29 40 23–275 Kosuth 1965–69 27 90 20–246 Stella 1964–68 26 36 28–327 Andre 1966–70 25 71 31–357 Koons 1985–89 25 83 30–347 Sherman 1977–81 25 54 23–27

10 Johns 1960–64 24 22 30–3411 Nauman 1966–70 23 53 25–2912 Holzer 1986–90 21 70 36–4012 Serra 1967–71 21 48 28–3214 Basquiat 1980–84 20 100 20–2414 Chicago 1979–83 20 95 40–4416 Serra 1977–81 19 43 38–4217 Schnabel 1980–84 17 61 29–3318 Fischl 1981–85 16 70 33–3718 Lin 1980–84 16 100 20–2420 Kruger 1981–85 15 48 36–40

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year period identified in the table accounted for more thanhalf the total number of illustrations of a given artist’swork. This temporal concentration was often extreme, forin no fewer than 6 cases, the five-year period listed intable 4 accounted for 90 percent or more of the total num-ber of illustrations of the artist’s work in the textbooks.

Table 5 gives additional evidence of the effect of the con-ceptual origins of most of the major works of art in thisperiod by showing the ages at which artists executed theworks listed in table 3. As in table 4, the artists are general-ly young. Twelve of the 22 works listed in table 5 weremade by artists in their twenties, whereas only 4—less than20 percent—were made by artists aged 40 and above.Remarkably, Joseph Kosuth produced One and ThreeChairs, which is tied for third place in the table, when hewas just 20. No comparably important work of art has beenproduced by an American artist at such an early age in thepast 150 years (Galenson 2002, 2005a, b).

Conceptual Artists at Work

Conceptual artists work systematically, after planningtheir work carefully in advance. The clarity of their pur-pose allows them to create individual works that fullyembody significant innovations and can therefore beunderstood and appreciated even when seen in isolationfrom other works by the artist. Thus, conceptual paintersin the modern era have had a great advantage over their

experimental counterparts in being able to produce indi-vidual large and complicated paintings that are generallyrecognized as important and successful works and canstand alone as milestones in art history (Galenson 2004).The domination of recent American art by conceptualartists therefore helps to explain why a number ofextremely large, and often complex, works are positionedat the top of table 3.

The Dinner Party ranks second in table 3, behind SpiralJetty. To symbolize the neglect of women’s achievementsby historians, Judy Chicago decided to create a work thatwould reinterpret the Last Supper from a woman’s pointof view. Because she found she could not reduce the num-ber of guests to 13, she designed the table as a triangle andtripled that number (Chicago 1979, 11–12). Chicagoselected women who were representative of particular his-torical epochs, whose lives embodied some significantachievement, and who had worked in some way toimprove conditions for women. After Chicago hadplanned the work, she assembled a team of people to helpher execute it. A total of 400 people—mostly, but not all,women—worked on The Dinner Party over a period offive years. As described in an exhibition catalog, the workhas many components:

A triangular table, forty-eight feet per side, is arranged withthirty-nine commemorative settings in which sculpturalceramic plate forms, with napkins, knives, forks, spoons, andgoblets, sit on individualized needlework tablecloth runners.Each plate setting creates a memorial to the life of an indi-vidual woman in history. The whole is complemented by theadditional 999 names of women penned across the 2,300 lus-trous triangular tiles that comprise the raised floor on whichthe table sits. The Dinner Party thus images a collaborationthat is a collective or combined history of 1,038 women,through a process that was itself collaborative. (Sackler2002, 118–19)

In spite of the ambitious nature of its collaborative exe-cution, The Dinner Party was a conceptual work. Chicago(1996, 57) herself left no doubt that her conception was thework’s real message, and that the process of producing itwas secondary: “I am often asked whether the process ofcreating The Dinner Party was even more important thanthe final work of art, and my answer has always been no.”Like the large paintings specifically planned by nineteenth-century French Salon painters to be seen in institutional set-tings, Chicago explained that “The Dinner Party was con-ceived to be exhibited in major museums” (ibid., 118). Yetbecause it was a conceptual work, Chicago discovered thatits message could be communicated even if the work itselfwas not displayed:

It was extremely fortuitous that The Dinner Party was struc-tured so that the information it embodied was able to enterthe culture in several forms. Consequently, when the work ofart was blocked by the art system, the book [about the work,written by Chicago] brought the concept of the piece to whatturned out to be an extremely receptive audience. (ibid., 78)

182 HISTORICAL METHODS

TABLE 5. Age at Which Artists Executed WorksListed in Table 3

Rank Artist Age

1 Smithson 322 Chicago 403 Kosuth 203 Lin 223 Serra 426 Johns 287 Johns 258 Christo 488 Holzer 398 Johns 25

11 Johns 3011 Nauman 2913 Christo 4113 Close 2813 Hesse 3013 Johns 2513 Kosuth 2113 Stella 2319 Fischl 3419 Haacke 2919 Haacke 3519 Sherman 25

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One and Three Chairs is tied for third place in table 3. Itconsists of a wooden folding chair, flanked on one side bya life-size photograph of the same chair, and on the other byan enlarged photograph of a dictionary definition of theword chair. As a 19-year-old art student, Joseph Kosuth(1991, 90) had given up painting, having decided that “thebelief system of the old language of painting had col-lapsed.” Kosuth (1989, 13) believed that what the artist nowhad to do “was to question the nature of art,” and he couldnot do that by painting, because by painting, the artist wasalready accepting the nature of art.

One and Three Chairs was one of Kosuth’s earliestefforts at demonstrating how art could move beyondobjects into a more purely conceptual realm. The workincluded a physical object, a visual representation of thatobject, and a mental representation of the object. Later,Kosuth began to omit the first two of these from his workand provide only the mental representation, in the form ofphotographs of dictionary definitions of a variety ofwords (Wheeler 1991, 248).

Kosuth’s austere form of conceptual art reflected hisunderstanding of the implications of Duchamp’s ready-mades: “With the unassisted readymade, art changed itsfocus from the form of the language to what was beingsaid” (Kosuth 1991, 18). In the mid-1960s, Kosuth (ibid., 3)observed: “How things were made was once important. Thefinal object is now important.” His early work was amongthe most radical solutions to the problem that a number ofartists of the period were posing, in their desire to producea less commercial art that would undermine the gallery sys-tem, of how to make a more purely conceptual art that didnot depend on any specific physical embodiment. Thus,Kosuth (ibid., 3) declared that the objects in his work wereunimportant:

All I make are models. The actual works of art are ideas . . .It does not matter who actually makes the model, nor wherethe model ends up.

Kosuth’s explicit use of language in his work provided amodel for a number of other conceptual artists who wereseeking ways to present ideas without making objects. Thathe could produce a work as influential as One and ThreeChairs at such an early age was a result of his success atcreating a form of art that embodied a complex idea with-out requiring extensive experience in the use of traditionalartistic methods and materials.

Like Spiral Jetty and The Dinner Party, Tilted Arc gainedattention in part for its large size and monumental concep-tion; it consisted of a curved sheet of steel 120 feet long and12 feet high. The sculpture was commissioned by the fed-eral government’s General Services Administration and wasinstalled in 1981 in Federal Plaza in New York City. Afterconsiderable public debate, the work was removed in 1989,in spite of the objections of the artist and many others in theart world (see Senie 2002 for a review of the debate).

Ironically, the work’s removal was a consequence ofRichard Serra’s success in using Tilted Arc to achieve spe-cific goals he had set for his art. During the 1960s, Serra(1994, 188) decided that what he wanted for his work was“to take it out of the places that are considered the cultur-al institutions and bring it into greater dialogue, for betteror for worse, with the general condition of where peopleare. My works deal head-on with their architectural sites.”From his admiration of Barnett Newman’s large canvasesin which blocks of color are divided by vertical lines,Serra (ibid., 280) also decided he wanted “to cut spacewith sculpture” in a way that the viewer would be engaged“as you walk or scan the field. It is an experience thatunfolds in time.” Serra’s success in achieving his twogoals with Tilted Arc—making viewers confront his work,and having that confrontation require a passage of time—became a powerful argument for its removal, as opponentsof the work could point to many people who worked inbuildings on the plaza who complained that the sculptureinconvenienced them by requiring them to walk out oftheir way in getting to and from their jobs.

Unlike the other artists whose work ranks high in table3, Serra’s approach to art was not conceptual but experi-mental. He was one of a group of young artists in the1960s who were sometimes called Process artists. Serra’s(1994, 3) first published article, titled “Verb List,1967–68,” was a series of active verbs specifying thingsthat could be done to materials: “to roll, to crease, to fold,to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist . . . ” Serra laterrecalled his situation at the time:

I was very involved with the physical activity of making. Itstruck me that instead of thinking about what a sculpture isgoing to be and how you’re going to do it compositionally,what if you just enacted those verbs in relation to a material,and didn’t worry about the result? So I started tearing andcutting and folding lead. (Tomkins 2002, 57)

Serra (1994, 167) has explained that he avoids planninghis works:

I never begin to construct with a specific intention. I don’twork from a priori ideas and theoretical propositions. Thestructures are the result of experimentation and invention. Inevery search there is always a degree of unforeseeability, asort of troubling feeling, a wonder after the work is com-plete, after the conclusion. The part of the work which sur-prises me invariably leads to new works.

For Serra, the source of his achievement lay in the processof making the work:

I can’t think my way through a problem; I have to work myway through a problem. And that’s why I’m interested inbuilding things, because often what happens in the process ofsustaining the effort to build something is that you could nothave foreseen what you thought the conclusion of what yourintention would be. And the physical fact of things countsfor a lot more to me than the thought that doesn’t take a phys-ical manifestation. (Sylvester 2001, 302)

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Because he begins his works without a specific goal, Serra(1994, 168) must execute his work himself:

The building method is based on hand manipulation. A con-tinuous hands-on procedure, both in the studio and at thesite, . . . allows me to perceive structures I could not imag-ine, for retention of physical properties is limited.

Serra’s experimental approach, as well as his desire thathis finished works reveal the process of their construction,reflect the powerful influence of Jackson Pollock on his art(Serra 1994, 113; Kimmelman 1998, 55–64). But Serrawanted to extend Pollock’s all-over compositions beyondthe constraining boundaries of the picture frame or thegallery, and his friendship with Robert Smithson, whom hehelped in laying out Spiral Jetty, prompted Serra (ibid., 114,159) to make larger works that were designed for specificoutdoor locations. Smithson’s influence contributed both tothe monumental size of Tilted Arc and to its demise, forwhen the government proposed to relocate the work to analternate site, Serra’s response was unyielding:

Tilted Arc was commissioned and designed for one particu-lar site: Federal Plaza. It is a site-specific work and as suchnot to be relocated. To remove the work is to destroy thework. (ibid., 194)

Thus, although Tilted Arc is currently in storage, Serra’sposition remains that Tilted Arc is destroyed (ibid., 194).

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial might fairly be called“The Masterpiece of the Unknown Artist.” Its appearance in16 textbooks places it in a tie for third place in table 3.Remarkably, no other work by Maya Lin appears in any ofthe textbooks analyzed for this study.

Lin’s design for the memorial originated in an architec-tural seminar she took during her senior year at Yale. At thetime, there was a national design competition for a Vietnamveterans memorial, and the class, which was on funerealarchitecture, took this task as its final design project. Linand a few friends traveled to Washington, DC, to see theintended site for the memorial, and there Lin had the basicidea for her project: “I had a simple impulse to cut into theearth. I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth,opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time wouldheal.” She later recalled that when she returned to Yale, “Iquickly sketched my idea up, and it almost seemed too sim-ple, too little.” Yet she soon dismissed the idea of makingany additions: “The image was so simple that anythingadded to it began to detract from it.” When Lin decided toenter the national competition, she found that it took longerto write the required one-page description of her projectthan it had taken to design the memorial (Lin 2000, 4:8–11).

Lin’s design for the memorial occasioned considerablecontroversy. One criticism, that a veterans memorial mustinclude a statue of a soldier, was answered by placing asculpture of three infantrymen near one end of the work.The memorial was otherwise executed according to Lin’s

design, and it was dedicated in the fall of 1982, just 18months after Lin graduated from college.

In the two decades since she designed the Vietnam memo-rial, Lin has pursued a career as an architect and sculptor. Arecent book about women artists observed: “Now a benefi-ciary of a stream of commissions, this still-young masterdesigner is riding her good fortune, turning out institutionaland private projects while also making the individual sculp-tures to which she attaches such importance” (Munro 2000,485–86). Yet the present study demonstrates that from thevantage point of art scholars, Lin’s career consists of a singlework that has been described by one text as “one of the mostcompelling monuments in the United States” (Stokstad andGrayson 1995, 1162; also see Beardsley 1998, 124–25). Thata 20-year-old artist could conceive an idea that would be com-pletely embodied in a single major work, and not be followedby any others deemed significant by art scholars, is a quintes-sentially conceptual phenomenon. Lin’s (2000, 3:5) proce-dures still reflect her conceptual approach: “I begin by imag-ining an artwork verbally . . . I try not to find the form toosoon. Instead, I try to think about it as an idea without ashape.” Her plans for her works “are made instantaneously.Sometimes I just wake up and without really thinking make amodel” (ibid., 3:7).

American Icon

To come to terms with Smithson’s work requires recognitionthat the modernist paradigm was exhausted, superseded bythe terms of artistic production in the latter part of the twen-tieth century. (Drucker 1991, xiii)

The questions posed earlier about Spiral Jetty remain to beanswered. Table 3 documents its remarkable position amongart works of this era: not only does it appear in 93 percent ofthe books surveyed, but it is also the only work of the era thatappears in more than half of those books. How is it that anindividual work from a pluralist era can emerge so clearly asa dominant work, and in view of the fact that it has, why isthere not more excitement about the fact that the work cannow be seen for the first time in three decades?

In fact, Smithson’s ability to create a preeminent work in1970 was a consequence of the conceptual orientation of theart world of the time. The secret of his success with SpiralJetty appears to have been that he incorporated into thatsingle work a remarkable number of the central themes of theadvanced art of the 1960s. More generally, in a diversevariety of forms—monumental outdoor sculptures, indoorexhibits documenting them, published explanations of hisworks, and photographs and films of those works—Smithsoncreated a complex oeuvre that could represent many differentthings to different people, but that dealt with virtually everyimportant theoretical artistic issue of its time. The dense,enigmatic, and obscure nature of much of Smithson’s writingabout his work and his vision of art defies attempts to catalogthe work and its goals in any systematic way, but some cen-tral elements can be clearly identified.

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The 1960s witnessed the rise to dominance of conceptu-al art. Smithson’s approach to art was archetypally concep-tual. In one of the simplest statements he made about hiswork, he told an interviewer: “An object to me is the prod-uct of a thought.”4 The remarkable feature of his work is thesurprisingly large number of thoughts he was able to asso-ciate with the objects he created. Spiral Jetty is an out-standing example of that aspect, but many of the followinggeneralizations apply to all his works.

The actual shapes of his sculptures were simple. In this,they drew on Minimalism, which was the leading Americanart movement of the late sixties. Many art scholars catego-rize Smithson’s work as “Post-Minimalist” (e.g., Sandler1996, 58–62). Smithson put his stamp on this borrowing,however, by the scale of his works—he made Minimalismlarger, more monumental, and often more elegant.

In the placement of his monumental works in the land-scape, and by creating them from the landscape, Smithsonwas a pioneer of earth art. He was the first to use the termearthwork for the large objects that he and a few otherartists created in remote areas.5 Because of its scale, its ele-gant shape, and a host of other attributes, Spiral Jettybecame the trademark work of this movement.

The placement of art works in remote areas drew on theanti-gallery sentiment that was shared by many youngadvanced artists of the late sixties. Although Smithson reg-ularly participated in gallery shows, where he displayedwritten texts, photographs, stones, and other documentationof his earthworks, his major works appeared to symbolizethe rejection of the gallery-museum system by virtue oftheir scale and inaccessibility.6

Many artists of the 1960s were concerned with breakingthe restrictions of formalism and rejecting the traditionalcanon of art. In his writings, Smithson vigorously attackedtraditional divisions between the arts central to the for-malist theory that exerted a strong influence on much ofthe advanced art of the 1950s and early sixties, anddenounced Clement Greenberg and other less prominentcritics who wished to maintain the formalist purity ofpainting and sculpture (Smithson 1996, 48, 66–67, 339).In his work, Smithson subverted the strictures of formalisttheory in a number of ways. Not only were his sculpturesmade up of such base materials as dirt and stones, but theirlarge size and remote locations also required viewers toexperience them over longer periods of time than fine arthad traditionally involved.7 By bringing elements of hisoutdoor sculptures into galleries for display, Smithsondivided his works, thus destroying the unity of the indi-vidual monument that had traditionally been the goal ofsculpture, and thereby creating a new ambiguity in thelocation of the work.8 And in contrast to the traditionalconcern of sculpture with creating works that were com-plete and unchanging, Smithson (ibid., 155) explicitlyembraced entropy and the impact of nature on art worksthat would disintegrate over time.

Smithson included written texts in many of the gallerypresentations of his work, following the practice of JosephKosuth and other advanced conceptual artists of the sixties.Smithson was a prolific author, initially of art criticism, andlater of programmatic statements about his work and hisvision of art. In this, his practice reflected a vital tradition ofmodern art, for since the time of Italian Futurism and Rus-sian Constructivism, in the first few decades of the twentiethcentury, the impact of conceptual art movements has beengreatly enhanced by manifestos written by the artists them-selves. Smithson’s manifestos surpassed all such earlier doc-uments in the great range of subjects they touched on and theremarkable variety of the symbols they cited for particularworks. Smithson’s writings about art combined, often in baf-fling ways, his interests in entropy, archaeology, science fic-tion, physics, dinosaurs, geology, cartography, modern paint-ing, technology, philosophy, and a host of other subjects. Heprovided not one or two symbolic meanings for specificworks, but many more. So, for example, in an essay on Spi-ral Jetty, he associated its spiral shape variously with thesolar system, the molecular structure of the salt crystalsfound in the Great Salt Lake, Brancusi’s sketch of JamesJoyce as a “spiral ear,” the spiral of the reels of the moviefilm he used to document the work, the propeller of the heli-copter he used to survey the work, a painting by Jackson Pol-lock titled Eyes in the Heat, the ion source of a cyclotron, rip-ples in the water of the Great Salt Lake, and other imagesthat are presented in rapid-fire prose that seems intended todocument Smithson’s thought processes (Smithson 1996,143–53). The wide variety of suggested symbolic meaningsconsiderably increases the intellectual appeal of Spiral Jetty,because art scholars are not constrained by any specific sym-bolic interpretation but can instead choose from this clusterone or more that appeal to them.

Smithson made extensive use of photography in present-ing his work, in numerous ways. An early published articleabout his excursion into a suburban wasteland was accom-panied by still photographs he himself took with his Insta-matic camera (Smithson 1996, 70). Their inelegant snap-shot quality reinforced the unaccented prose that describedhis progress through the unattractive and banal landscape.Later, he also used movies in much more sophisticated fash-ion; for example, the construction of Spiral Jetty was filmedby a professional photographer according to detailed plansSmithson made for that treatment (Hobbs 1981, 194–95).The most popular photograph of the Spiral Jetty, whichappears in most of the textbooks surveyed for this study,was an aerial view taken by a photographer in 1970 underSmithson’s direction (Roberts 2004, 76). But perhaps themost dramatic photographs of Smithson’s work were thestills of Spiral Jetty taken from ground level, in whichSmithson himself appeared as a solitary standing humanfigure, dressed in black, silhouetted against the barren land-scape of the shore of the Great Salt Lake and reflected in thelake’s stagnant water (e.g., see the cover of Smithson 1996).

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All the preceding characteristics of Smithson’s practice andhis art appear to have contributed to making Spiral Jetty ananomaly, a uniquely synthetic work in an artistic era thatdefied synthesis. Remarkably, Smithson had made it anembodiment of virtually all the key theoretical issues that hadoccupied the energy of the advanced art world during the pre-ceding decade. Yet the reputation of the work has also beenincreased by the circumstances of Smithson’s tragic death. Hedied in 1973, at the age of 35, when the small plane fromwhich he was filming the staked-out plans for his latest workcrashed into a hillside, killing the pilot, the owner of the Texasranch where the work was to be situated, and Smithson him-self (Robins 1984, 85). Smithson’s premature death, in theprocess of making art, added poignancy to the images of thebrilliant and articulate young artist who created monumentalworks in remote and desolate places.

Spiral Jetty thus appears today as a work that stands forits time, made by a charismatic young artist who worked ona grand scale and who sacrificed his life for his art. In viewof this, in today’s atmosphere of media-star artists andblockbuster museum exhibitions, why is Spiral Jetty thesubject of so little fanfare?

The answer to this puzzle seems to lie in the fact that,in part as a consequence of the efforts of conceptual artistsof recent decades, photographs are now widely acceptedas adequate representations of many works of art. As pre-viously discussed, Joseph Kosuth presented photographsof written texts as sufficient representations of objects, orsubstitutes for them. Early in his career, Robert Smithsonappears not to have regarded photographs and other docu-mentation of his earthworks as works of art in their ownright, but as time went on he apparently realized that thesesecondary representations could not only enhance theappreciation of the primary works but could also becomepart of their meaning, embodying the same ideas as theobject they portray. His careful attention to the filming ofSpiral Jetty served to make the film “both a record and arepresentative work by Smithson” (Alloway 1975,231–35; Shapiro 1995, 154–59; Alberro and Norvell2001, 128). The availability of this film and of the dra-matic still photographs of Spiral Jetty, in combinationwith the considerable difficulty involved in traveling tothe actual site, appear to account for the fact that it couldbecome the greatest masterpiece that few people have everseen, and why today Spiral Jetty may be the destinationfor handfuls, but not busloads, of artistic pilgrims(Alloway 1984, 258–59).

The Disappearing Master

This investigation points strongly to the underlying sourceof the lack of coherence emphasized by art historians indescribing American art of the 1970s and beyond. As many inthe art world have observed, during this time there has been apersistently high demand for artistic novelty and innovation

(e.g., Tomkins 1989, 88; Hughes 1992, 401–4; Danto 1994,85–86; Sandler 1996, 443). This demand has produced aregime in which conceptual approaches, which can quicklycreate new results, have predominated. The result has beenthat the advanced art world has been flooded by a series ofnew ideas, often embodied in individual works, and in mostcases created by young artists who have failed to make morethan one significant contribution in their careers.9 Americanart in the last three decades of the twentieth century has there-fore produced more masterpieces than masters.

Perhaps the most telling quantitative evidence of thisphenomenon is found in table 4. In that table, which effec-tively ranks the most important periods in the careers of themost important American artists of this era, only threeartists have more than a single entry. And of these three, theconceptual innovators Jasper Johns and Frank Stella hadboth completed their two five-year periods listed in the tablebefore they reached the age of 35.10 Only the experimentalsculptor Richard Serra, whose second entry in the tablespans the ages 38–42, managed to make one of his two sig-nificant contributions even partly in his fifth decade.

With the exception of Serra, American art in the latetwentieth century appears to have produced no importantexperimental innovators whose work developed over anextended period. Nor—with the possible exceptions ofJohns and Stella—has it produced major conceptual inno-vators who made more than one important contribution.Now, with Johns, Serra, and Stella all past the age of 65, wecontinue to wait to see whether any younger American artistor artists can develop into figures whose entire careers canattract the attention of art scholars.

NOTES

I thank Robert Jensen for discussions, Amy Lee for research assistance,and the National Science Foundation for financial support.

1. For directions on how to reach Spiral Jetty, see Case (2003). No oneappears even to know how many people visit Spiral Jetty. In phone con-versations of July 10, 2003, neither John Bowsher, administrator of artsprograms at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, nor the acting chiefranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site in Utah—which anyonedriving to Spiral Jetty must go through—was able to give even a roughestimate of the number of visitors. (The rangers at Golden Spike NHS dorecommend that only 4-wheel-drive vehicles be used to make the trip toSpiral Jetty, because the gravel road has many large lava rocks embeddedin it.)

2. On the proliferation of new visual art forms during the twentieth cen-tury, see Galenson (2005c).

3. The generally young ages in table 4 might be attributable to the biasof the textbooks against recent work. Some bias is inevitable if onlybecause some of the books analyzed were published early in the 1990s andthus could not present later work. And table 4 contains no period in anyartist’s career that runs past 1990. Yet the same is not true for the late1980s, for the table does contain two periods from that time: Jeff Koons’swork from 1985–89 ties for 7th place, and Jenny Holzer’s work from1986–90 ties for 12th. In 1985, 10 of the artists in the sample were 45 orolder, yet none appears in table 4 for work done after that age.

4. This sentence appears slightly different in a book edited by the inter-viewer: “An object to me is a product of thought;” Alberro and Norvell(2001, 124). Preference is given here to the version quoted in the text,which was edited by Smithson (1996, 192), but for the point made here thedifference is insignificant.

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5. The artist apparently took the term from a science-fiction novel by BrianAldiss, titled Earthworks (Smithson 1996, 68; also see Crow 2004, 56).

6. A friend who knew Smithson when the artist was in high schoolrecalled that at that time Smithson “claimed he would invent an art thatwould pass galleries by—he wouldn’t give them the time of day” (AlanBrilliant, e-mail message to author, November 23, 2004). As it turns out,Smithson did create monumental earthworks that could not be presented ingalleries, but he nonetheless adapted his work to the requirements ofgallery exhibitions by devising what he called “nonsites,” which usedrocks and other materials taken from outdoor sites, as well as maps andwritten texts, to create indoor metaphors for outdoor works (see Smithson1996, 364).

7. Rosalind Krauss (1977, 282–83) argued that with Spiral Jetty, “thetransformation of sculpture—from a static, idealized medium to a tempo-ral and material one—that had begun with Rodin is fully achieved.”

8. See Krauss (1986, 279–87). Similarly, Robert Hobbs (1982, 15) notedthat viewers of Smithson’s nonsites in galleries were encouraged to visitthe original sites from which they derived, “but even if viewers journey tothe Site, they cannot experience the entire work of art because the portionthat is the Nonsite has already been removed.”

9. For as many as 8 of the 25 artists studied here, including such highlyranked artists as Johns and Sherman (who are both in the top 5 in table 2),the earliest year from which any of their work is reproduced in the text-books is the single year with the largest number of their illustrations.10. On the conceptual approaches of Johns and Stella, see Galenson

(2002).

REFERENCES

Alberro, A., and P. Norvell. 2001. Recording conceptual art. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Alloway, L. 1975. Topics in American art since 1945. New York: W. W.Norton.

———. 1984. Network. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.Beardsley, J. 1998. Earthworks and beyond. 3rd ed. New York: Abbeville

Press.Case, W. 2003. Pink water, white salt crystals, black boulders, and the

return of Spiral Jetty. Utah Geological Survey Notes 35 (1).Chicago, J. 1979. The Dinner Party. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.———. 1996. Beyond the flower. New York: Penguin Books.Crow, T. 2004. Cosmic exile: Prophetic turns in the life and art of Robert

Smithson. In Robert Smithson, edited by E. Tsai, 32–56. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.

Danto, A. 1994. Embodied meanings. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Drucker, J. 1991. Introduction. In Robert Smithson unearthed, edited by E.

Tsai, xiii–xvii. New York: Columbia University Press.Duchamp, M. 1989. The writings of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Da Capo

Press.Fineberg, J. 2000. Art since 1940. 2nd ed. New York: Abrams.Galenson, D. W. 2001. Painting outside the lines: Patterns of creativity in

modern art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.———. 2002. Was Jackson Pollock the greatest modern American

painter? A quantitative investigation. Historical Methods 35 (3):117–28.

———. 2004. The life cycles of modern artists: Theory and implications.Historical Methods 37 (3): 123–36.

———. 2005a. The methods and careers of leading American painters inthe late nineteenth century. NBER Working Paper 11545.

———. 2005b. Before Abstract Expressionism: Ranking Americanpainters and paintings of the early twentieth century. Dept. of Econom-ics, University of Chicago.

———. 2005c. Creating new art forms: Twentieth-century conceptualartists at work and play. Dept. of Economics, University of Chicago.

Hobbs, R. 1981. Robert Smithson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.———. 1982. Robert Smithson: A retrospective view. Ithaca, NY: Herbert

Johnson Museum of Art.Hughes, R. 1992. Nothing if not critical. New York: Penguin.Kimmelman, M. 1998. Portraits. New York: Modern Library.———. 2002. Out of the deep. New York Times Magazine, October 13.Kosuth, J. 1989. Joseph Kosuth interviews. Stuttgart: Edition Patricia

Schwartz.———. 1991. Art after philosophy and after. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Krauss, R. 1977. Passages in modern sculpture. New York: Viking Press.———. 1986. The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist

myths. Cambridge: MIT Press.Lin, M. 2000. Boundaries. New York: Simon & Schuster.Munro, E. 2000. Originals. New ed. New York: Da Capo Press.Roberts, J. 2004. Mirror-travels: Robert Smithson and history. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Robins, C. 1984. The pluralist era. New York: Harper and Row.Sackler, E., ed. 2002. Judy Chicago. New York: Watson-Guptill.Sandler, I. 1996. Art of the postmodern era. New York: HarperCollins.Senie, H. 2002. The Tilted Arc controversy. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.Serra, R. 1994. Writings, interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Shapiro, G. 1995. Earthwards. Berkeley: University of California Press.Smithson, R. 1996. Robert Smithson: The collected writings. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Stokstad, M., and M. Grayson. 1995. Art history. New York: Abrams.Sylvester, D. 2001. Interviews with American artists. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.Tomkins, C. 1989. Post- to neo-: The art world of the 1980s. New York:

Penguin.———. 2002. Man of steel. New Yorker, August 5, 52–63.Wheeler, D. 1991. Art since mid-century. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall.

APPENDIX

The 40 books surveyed for this study are listed here, ordered alpha-betically by author’s surname. The 6 books also used to select theartists for the study are indicated by asterisks.

1. *Adams, L. S. A History of Western Art (New York: Abrams, 1994).2. Archer, M. Art since 1960 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).3. Arnason, H. H., M. F. Prather, and D. Wheeler. History of Modern

Art, 4th ed. (New York: Abrams, 1998).4. Baigell, M. A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture

(New York: HarperCollins, 1996).5. *Bjelajac, D. American Art (New York: Abrams, 2001).6. Blistene, B. A History of 20th-Century Art (Paris: Flammarion, 2001).7. Bocola, S. The Art of Modernism (Munich: Prestel, 1999).8. Britt, D. Modern Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).9. Craven, W. American Art (New York: Abrams, 1994).10. Dempsey, A. Art in the Modern Era (New York: Abrams, 2002).11. Doss, E. Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 2002).12. Fineberg, J. Art since 1940, 2nd ed. (New York: Abrams, 2000).13. Fleming, W. Arts and Ideas, 9th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt

Brace, 1995).14. Gilbert, R. Living with Art, 5th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998).15. Honour, H., and J. Fleming. The Visual Arts, 5th ed. (New York:

Abrams, 1999).16. *Hopkins, D. After Modern Art, 1945–2000 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2000).17. *Hughes, R. American Visions (New York: Knopf, 1997).18. Hunter, S., and J. Jacobus. Modern Art, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992).19. Janson, H. W., and A. F. Janson. History of Art, 5th ed. (New York:

Abrams, 1997).20. Kleiner, F., C. Mamiya, and R. Tansey. Gardner’s Art through the

Ages (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001).21. Lucie-Smith, E. Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century (New York:

Abrams, 1997).22. ———. Movements in Art since 1945 (New York: Thames and Hud-

son, 2001).23. Marceau, J., ed. Art: A World History (New York: DK Publishing,

1998).24. Parmesani, L. Art of the Twentieth Century (Milan: Skira, 2000).25. Pohl, F. K. Framing America (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002).26. Preble, D., S. Preble, and P. Frank. Artforms, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2002).27. Richter, K. Art from Impressionism to the Internet (Munich: Prestel,

2001).

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35. Tobler, J., ed. The American Art Book (London: Phaidon, 1999).36. Walther, I. F., ed. Art of the 20th Century. 2 vols. (Cologne: Taschen,

1998).37. Wheeler, D. Art since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (Engle-

wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991).38. *Wilkins, D., B. Schultz, and K. Linduff. Art Past, Art Present, 3rd

ed. (New York: Abrams, 1997).39. Wood, P., et al. Modernism in Dispute (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1994).40. Yenawine, P. How to Look at Modern Art (New York: Abrams,

1991).

188 HISTORICAL METHODS

28. Two books treated as one: Sandler, I. American Art of the 1960s(New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Sandler, I. Art of the Postmodern Era(New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

29. Silver, L. Art in History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993).30. Sprocatti, S. A Guide to Art (New York: Abrams, 1992).31. *Stokstad, M. Art History (New York: Abrams, 1995).32. Strickland, C., and J. Boswell. The Annotated Mona Lisa (Kansas

City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 1992).33. Tamplin, R., ed. The Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).34. Tesch, J., and E. Hollmann, eds. Icons of Art: The 20th Century

(Munich: Prestel, 1997).

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2. In cases where the stockholder or security holder is a trustee, include in items 10 and 11 the name of the person or corporation forwhom the trustee is acting. Also include the names and addresses of individuals who are stockholders who own or hold 1 percentor more of the total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the publishing corporation. In item 11, if none, check thebox. Use blank sheets if more space is required.

3. Be sure to furnish all circulation information called for in item 15. Free circulation must be shown in items 15d, e, and f.

4. Item 15h., Copies not Distributed, must include (1) newsstand copies originally stated on Form 3541, and returned to the publisher, (2) estimated returns from news agents, and (3), copies for office use, leftovers, spoiled, and all other copies not distributed.

5. If the publication had Periodicals authorization as a general or requester publication, this Statement of Ownership, Management,and Circulation must be published; it must be printed in any issue in October or, if the publication is not published during October,the first issue printed after October.

6. In item 16, indicate the date of the issue in which this Statement of Ownership will be published.

7. Item 17 must be signed.

Failure to file or publish a statement of ownership may lead to suspension of Periodicals authorization.

I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this formor who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions(including civil penalties).

a. Total Number of Copies (Net press run)

HISTORICAL METHODS

XX Fall 2005

Summer 2005

September 29, 2005Executive Director

820

311

0

161

0

472

55

0

0

9

64

536

284

820

88

811

308

0

211

0

519

55

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0

11

66

585

226

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