Making art, making artists - relationship of artists and assistants - includes interviews with 23 artists - Cover Story

Art in America, Jan, 1993 by Wade Saunders

With the relative collapse of the art market over the last two years, a number of artists have had to cut back on expenses, including assistants' wages. But when the market picks up again, so, doubtless, will the hiring of assistants. While some artists will never want assistants, many artists will work with them if they possibly can, since assistants free up their time and allow them to produce significantly more work. Young artists know that working as an assistant will pay their rent; the job may also help them develop their own work and give them the connections to get it shown. A great deal of what is exhibited would not exist without the labor of assistants. They play an essential part in the creation of contemporary art, even though artists may deny, or downplay their role.

Isaac Wilkin

Born 1936, Johannesburg, South Africa. Studied at St. Martins School of Art, London, 1957-60. Currently lives in Pemberton, N.J. Most recent solo exhibition at Walker Hill Art Center, Seoul, Korea, 1992. Forthcoming exhibition at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 1993.

Henry Moore must have had some sort of apprenticeship program in effect by the early '50s, since Tony Caro felt free to ask him for a job then. I worked for Moore for two and a half years, between 1961 and 1963. When I first started, there were four of us working full-time, and it increased to six by the time I left. It was about an hour from London, and I commuted there. Moore owned several houses around his studio which he rented at nominal cost to those assistants who wanted to reside there. No one really stayed on permanently, though perhaps it happened after I left; people would work for two, three, five years at the most. There may have been over 100 assistants in total who passed through the studio in Moore's lifetime. There weren't any women when I was there, and I don't think he hired any women previous to that time.

I was paid a mere pittance at the time, not enough to live on. Moore was not a big payer in those days. Just after I left, a group of assistants marched up to him in protest and demanded more pay, since they just couldn't get by. I don't remember the outcome; he may have given them a slight raise. He didn't believe in paying high wages to assistants because it was a privilege to work for him and he was a bit tight with money.

Moore worked in a small studio in the back of the complex in which we were working. It was probably about 15 feet square, low-ceilinged, very intimate; he used to sit in a wicker chair, listening to the radio, with a small turning stand so he could rotate what he was working on. He would produce his little maquettes there, then put the completed studies - some no more than 2 or 3 inches tall - on various shelves. He usually had a particular assistant in mind to carry out a particular enlargement; he would call you in, point to a certain shelf and ask which maquette you wanted to enlarge.

Sometimes we would go up directly to full scale; other times we would do an intermediary-scale version. He asked me to make one piece that derived from some animal-spine bones that locked together, in around a 3-foot scale. The sculpture was greatly admired by Gordon Bunshaft, who commissioned Moore to enlarge it to around 14 feet. The decision to go to a larger scale usually rested on whether someone liked the piece enough to commission it bigger. I don't think he would have made the pieces that large on a speculative basis.