Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century.

Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century, by Cynthia Jaffee McCabe with essays by Robert C. Hobbs and David Shapiro. Smithsonian Institution Press/224 pp./$32.00 (sb). This exhibition catalog from the show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1984 divides the history of twentieth-century collaboration into three periods: between World War I and II, 1950 to 1960 and from 1960 to the present. McCabe tackles the interwar period with an indepth discussion of the birth of Dada and Surrealism, tracing the development of artist teams united in response to the political scene. As she follows the spread of these European artists to the United States, McCabe focuses on their continued collaborative activities with their American contemporaries. Shapiro considers the writing of Gilles Deieuze and Jacques Derrida, among others, in his theoretical examination of collaboration. His look at the American artists of the 1950s and the 1960s includes examples in which artists alter works from the past without the input of the originators as well as collaborations in which the individuality of each participant refused to disappear into a group kinetic. Hobbs concludes the catalog with a look at work dating from the 1960s to the present, to discuss the "Great Person" theory of art history--the belief in a lone genius producing paradigm-changing works. Tracing the development of the cult status of the individual from the Romantic era to the present, Hobbs argues that modem art world celebrities such as Andy Warhol are essentially non-individuals and play a cliched outsider role of the artist In company.