Artist Mobility Networks, Hub Dependence, and Cross-Cohort Cultural Persistence: A Historical Network Analysis of Visual Artists Born in 1850–1969

Inter-city networks of cultural producers offer one measurable window on urban cultural resilience. Using Wikidata records, with Getty ULAN identifiers for authority control, this study builds birthplace-to-work-location networks for 15,816 painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers born in 1850–1969 and grouped into six 20-year birth cohorts. Each tie records a documented spatial association whose timing is approximated by birth cohort. Two network-level dimensions of resilience are examined: structural dependence on hubs, through node-removal stress tests benchmarked against degree-preserving null networks, and cross-cohort persistence of cultural attraction, through historical forecasting from cohort t to cohort t + 1. In every cohort, removing the 5% of cities with the highest PageRank leaves 18–27% of the artist-flow weight, against about 90% under random removal, and every observed network is more vulnerable than its nulls. The current cultural scale carries most of the forecasting signal (held-out R2 = 0.733). Connectivity adds a small, consistent increment that is clearest for identifying future hubs (ROC-AUC from 0.827 to 0.866); the regression gain (R2 = 0.750) is statistically uncertain. Results hold under normalized outcomes, city-grouped validation, metropolitan harmonization, documentation controls, and event-dated ties, and the high concentration of the latest cohort reflects dense Dutch documentation.