The Collaborative Nature of Art

Most forms of art-theater, film, dance, architecture, music-are inherently collaborative. With rare exceptions, all involve the participation of more than one individual. Only those forms of art-such as literature, painting, sculpture, and musical composition-that we think of when we speak of the author, artist, or composer are generally taken to be the work of one extraordinary human being. But in fact, this was not always so. The concept of the isolated genius emerged in the Renaissance along with capitalism and, while most writing or musical composition seems indeed to be a solitary endeavor, every mode or style of visual art can be made collaboratively.

A collaboration can reflect the personality of a single artist as it did in the studio of Rembrandt where, according to recent scholarship, the marks of the Master’s most intimate subjectivity-brushstrokes, psychological insight, impasto, ‘touch’-turn out to have been applied at times by hands other than his own. Thus, the one artist who has always been thought of as unique, as a particularly subjective kind of genius, seems to have engaged in a form of corporate art making. In this case, the collaboration retained the name and the characteristic of its dominant member, Rembrandt[1]. But a collaboration can also generate a completely new artistic personality. A remarkable group of fourteenth-century Sienese paintings, once thought to be the work of Sassetta, are now attributed to an unknown artist identified as the Master of the Osservanza. These paintings were probably produced in the workshop of Vico di Luca, perhaps in collaboration with Sassetta and the young Sano di Pietro. The group of works assigned to the Master of the Osservanza is so internally consistent, the collective personality so distinctive and so unlike that of its conjectured participants, that in the absence of definitive documentation it still seems as though the artist might eventually be proved to have been one person[2]. Whatever his