Does an Artist Ever Work Alone?

All of us love the idea of the artist alone: in her studio, painting; at her desk, writing; in her atelier, draping.

But the truth is that most art is more of a group effort than a solo endeavor. (The outliers may be the novelist or poet, who can and often do create in isolation.) A dress might begin with a designer’s sketch, but making it real takes a staff of many — tailors, sewers, embellishers, the model upon whom it’s fit (and refit and refit). The majority will never be publicly credited or recognized, but the person to whom the work is attributed knows better: Making anything requires many hands.

Our feature “Everyone Who Made This Happen” reveals just how many people it takes to create something. Even something as seemingly simple as a potato pizza at the influential Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant: The chef Dan Barber may have invented the recipe, but he didn’t engineer the potato (a new variety), or grow it, or clean it, or slice it or purée it — much less make the crust atop which it’s placed. Along with the apparently easy, we also look at the works that are clearly complicated, like the live-action, puppet-led version of Hayao Miyazaki’s classic 2001 animated film, “Spirited Away.” We went backstage at the London Coliseum to photograph some of the designers, actors and company who created and now animate the play’s 65 puppets. (It takes four puppeteers alone to make Haku, a nearly 20-foot-long foam-and-crinoline dragon, come to life.)

I shouldn’t have found the images in this story so surprising — T, after all, couldn’t be produced without its staff of 28, to mention nothing of the people who print and ship it. But I did find them moving, as, I’d venture, the subjects themselves did. One of the buzzwords in contemporary art these days is “collectivism,” a rebuke to that enduring and generally baseless myth of the singular artist-madman-genius. But the word should also be a reminder to all of us that in art, as in so many other things in our society, no one stands alone. The credit, and the responsibility, is shared.

On the Covers

Hair by Claire Grech. Makeup by Vassilis Theotokis. Models, from left: Lara Menezes at Next Management, Libby Bennett at Boundary London