HOW MANY PIECES OF ARTS ARE PRODUCED BY ARTISTS IN A LIFETIME?

An artist seldom go into the art world to create a certain amount of work.  It is unimportant as it is the quality and content of the work that is often remembered.  Also It is unrealistic to believe that an artist will become famous by painting a few works of art, if fame that is even a goal.  Perhaps the goal is not to become famous rather it is to create and express themselves as artists.  The creation in most case are just a physical manifestation of the message;  However, in studying historic art figures we can conclude that most known artists made hundreds if not thousands of works of art in their careers. The amount of work an artist create may depend on so many factors.  For example if an artist begins creating later in life they may not have the same body of work as a life time artist, or if an artist creates sculptures the may have less work than an artist creates drawings.  The number of works greatly changes and depends on many factors: life situation, work, time, availability of materials, etc. Often we also don’t have all the works produced by an artist, so we often don’t know what they really produced.

Here are a few examples of known artist and the amount of pieces they created in their lifetime:

French painter Claude Monet painted 1983 paintings.

Paul Cézanne 954.

Henri Rosseau 261.

Edvard Munch 1789.

René Magritte 1094.

Paula Modersohn-Becker 734.

Wassily Kandisky 1177.

Joan Mirò 2078.

Georgia O’Keeffe 821.

Paul Klee produced in his lifetime 733 paintings, 4877 drawings, 3197 paperworks, 54 etchings, 38 lithographies , 3 woodworks, 16 sculpture. Altogether a whopping number of 8918 works.

Artist may also have creative periods as seen with mixed media Trinidadian artist GA Gardner who created over 300 pieces of art in 18 months.