Jeff Koons's "Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold)" (1994–2006), for sale at Sotheby's on November 14, gets an assist from some friends.

Courtesy Ronnie Cutrone Studio

Rarely seen Polaroids that Andy Warhol and his assistant Ronnie Cutrone took of each other between 1977 and '79. There are few photos of the two together, as one was always behind the camera, Cutrone explains.

Christopher Wool Damien Hirst Sol LeWitt Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol Jasper Johns Joel Shapiro Francis Bacon

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Jeff Koons has 87 of them laboring in shifts. Damien Hirst employs several teams, as needed. Jasper Johns has had the same one for 23 years, and Kiki Smith’s accompanies her everywhere. Yet John Currin can hardly stand the idea. A studio assistant? “I’m a terrible coworker,” he says. He prefers to go it alone.

Most artists today depend on at least one extra hand to keep their studios in order and help prime their creative pumps. That could mean anything from mixing paint and cleaning brushes to listening to the boss think out loud. It can also involve making the actual pieces while the artist supplies the vision—the identity for the brand, so to speak. Traditionally, a young wannabe’s best entree into the profession has been to assist an established mentor. Some parlay these jobs into big careers; others may remain in the shadows.

What is curious is how differently the market treats work done by assistants in different eras. Consider how quickly a putative Old Master painting priced in the millions is devalued should new evidence prove it to have been made by other hands. A 1995 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” explored this issue by juxtaposing pictures by the master himself with those of his disciples. His studio, it seems, was happy to employ imitators skilled enough to turn out “Rembrandts” like a machine. Still, it was relatively easy to tell genius from its reflection.

Such distinctions are not always so clear—or so necessary—in the realm of contemporary art. Paintings by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat may require authentication before sale, but no doubts about genuineness haunt artworks by living artists such as Hirst, Koons or Takashi Murakami, whose prices can be astronomical. None of them makes his own paintings or even thinks he should, not when others can do the job better. Likewise, the intense labor required to produce Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings was never entirely his own, yet no one ever said the work itself was not his creation.

It is fair to ask if the art market operates on a double standard that treats certain kinds of “assisted” works as deceptions while accepting others as unique. For an answer, says Laura Paulson, senior director for contemporary art at Christie’s New York, “we have to go back to Duchamp’s readymades and the idea of liberating the artist’s hand.”

The Duchampian notions of mechanical reproduction reached full flower in the 1960s, when artists like Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began silkscreening with helpers. “The idea of art changed to be less about individual brushstrokes and more about the image,” Paulson says. “Mechanical means expanded the artist’s product. The studio assistant, who became almost an alter ego, enabled this process.

“Look at Ronnie Cutrone and Warhol,” she continues. “Andy set up the still life. Ronnie made the photo and the screen. And this whole act has become amplified to an extraordinary level with artists like Koons and Hirst.”

Cutrone, who was Warhol’s principal painting assistant from 1972 to 1982 and has retained ownership of the photographs he took for Warhol’s paintings, describes their working relationship as almost codependent. “I was born with a duplicate color sense to Warhol’s,” Cutrone recalls. “He would say, ‘Ronnie, mix me a green.’ And I would attempt to clarify: ‘What green?’ He would say, ‘Up-front green.’ And I would know what he meant. But I wasn’t going to paint his paintings.” Warhol, he adds, painted for hours a day but also took time to experiment with new ideas—not all of which were his own.

Take the “Shadows,” the 1978 series of 102 abstract panels that Warhol called “one painting with parts.” According to Cutrone, they were his idea. “It was Andy’s dream to make abstract art, and he could do it fairly well, but people didn’t like it,” Cutrone explains. “I said, ‘Look, you’re Andy Warhol. If you want to make abstract art, you have to make something that is but isn’t: a shadow. I had this idea a long time, but I was never going to do it. So I mixed all the colors and stretched all the canvases and installed them in Heiner Friedrich’s gallery in SoHo. I wasn’t jealous. They didn’t sell.” (Seventy-two of the canvases from Freidrich’s collection are now on permanent display at Dia:Beacon, in upstate New York.)

How should we evaluate an assistant’s role in the act of creation? Does it really matter if artists touch their own works, as long as these works are unique and are made in their presence? “Regardless of the artist’s distance from the process,” Paulson says, “there is a nuance that gives it his identity. If there were to be dot paintings generated by someone who used to work for Hirst, you would feel it, and it would not be seen as having any value in the market.”

By helping an established mentor, novices learn firsthand what being a working artist actually involves. The painter Carroll Dunham assisted Dorothea Rockburne off and on from 1970 through 1973 in New York. “In a way, that was my art school,” he says. “It’s important to be involved with the daily operation of a studio and how you organize it both physically and psychologically. But the best part was the incidental talking about art.”

Today many aspiring artists skip this journeyman step. They enter the market while still in school, as collectors buy work from thesis exhibitions and dealers cherry-pick talent for group shows. Not long after graduation, the most promising may be preparing solo debuts and hiring assistants of their own out of the same pool.

At 28, Dan Colen is a budding star who was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and whose paintings sell for around $50,000 each, according to his dealer, Javier Peres, of Peres Projects, in Los Angeles. Lately, these works have been colorful abstractions that Colen calls “bird shit” paintings—an accurate description of their appearance. “He made the first couple of them and gave us directions,” says Theo Rosenblum, one of five $15-an-hour part-time workers in Colen’s New York studio. “A lot of the work involves developing our own ways of painting them. That is what’s interesting: There are different styles of bird shit. The way these paintings are, it’s almost better to have different hands on them.”

No such leeway is given to the staff at Koons’s studio, which was operating around the clock last spring to prepare paintings for a show at the Gagosian Gallery in London in June. “There’s a learning curve,” says Koons’s longtime studio manager, Gary McCraw. “The painters learn how Jeff sees things so they can make his art. The work is very labor intensive. Tracing might require six people on one painting. Basically, he’s quality control.”

Murakami runs an even tighter ship at his studios in Asaka, Japan, and Long Island City, New York, which are modeled on both Warhol’s Factory and the artisanal workshops of the Edo period in Japan. The artist has 35 employees in New York alone and nearly 20 in Tokyo. “All of the design work is done on computer in Japan,” says Yuko Sakata, director of the New York offices of Kaikai Kiki, the company that produces Murakami’s paintings, sculptures, prints and animations and also manages the careers of seven other Japanese artists. These include Chiho Aoshima and Mr., who both worked for Murakami.

Although many artists maintain large studios like Murakami’s and Koons’s—Matthew Barney and Julian Schnabel are two who combine art making with film production— others prefer a more personal approach. “I’m a mom-and-pop operation,” says Ross Bleckner, who brings in one or two art students to work in an office beside his studio but prefers to create alone. “I’m the mom—and I’m the pop. And I like to keep it that way.”

Kiki Smith retains two assistants to help her in her studio and one to run her office. “What I like is that, when people show up at a certain time of day, it kicks you out of your own subjectivity and forces you to think in an orderly fashion instead of drifting,” she says. “For self-employed people, that’s a big thing.”

What about the impact of such jobs on the assistants? They can reap unexpected benefits—but there are also drawbacks. Painter Carl Fudge, who spent nearly 10 years in Smith’s employ, says he started out “grinding glass sperm” but soon found himself becoming part of her life: “She used me as a barrier against people she didn’t know. I sort of protected her.” He also helped install her shows all over the world. “We went to amazing places and met the most interesting people,” he recalls, referring to such travel, however, as “a great experience rather than a career benefit.” His tenure, which ended in 1998, affected his own identity as an artist as well. “Even a couple of weeks ago,” he says, “a museum called asking for Kiki.”

The painter Alexander Ross helped Julian Lethbridge move his New York studio to a SoHo loft and ended up managing the whole building, where Hirst, artist Michael Hurson and 303 Gallery director Lisa Spellman also lived. “From Julian I learned how the art world functions,” Ross says. But meeting the others didn’t really advance his career. “It opened doors to my mind,” he explains, “not anywhere else.”

Many artists bring on additional people just for specific projects. To prepare “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,” his exhibition last winter at Lombard-Freid Projects, in New York, Michael Rakowitz needed plenty of help from his team of six. The show consisted of about 60 small-scale reconstructions—made with Iraqi food wrappers and Arabic newspapers—of artifacts stolen from the National Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 American invasion. Rakowitz intends to remake all 7,000 of the looted pieces.

In this case, the assistants—students, mostly—may make long-term commitments. But how long is too long to stay? Bleckner rotates his helpers out every few years. “After a certain point, you fear they may hold working for you against you if their career has not happened the way they thought it should,” he explains. Dunham concurs: “If you’re ambitious, you have to get out.”

The sculptor Joel Shapiro, who generally works on a large scale, has long relied on assistants, including some who weren’t sculptors themselves. Back in the early 1980s, for instance, painter Christopher Wool cut wood for him (“It was the best job I ever had,” Wool says). These days Shapiro works closely with Ichiro Kato, a master woodworker, and Patrick Strzelec, an artist who is expert at casting. “But while they’re realizing your work, they sometimes have to suppress their instincts,” he says. “They have a role in the shaping of a piece—but they also have their own art to make. Those who are pivotal to your work stay with you, but it’s not necessarily a happy position for that person.”

James Meyer’s 22 years with Jasper Johns have brought him security. He’s been careful, however, to maintain his own painting practice, even though it means he has to get up at 5 a.m. to work for a few hours before starting his day with Johns. “That way you don’t feel like you’re not moving ahead,” he says.

Meyer also points to the dangers of being associated so long with so celebrated an artist. Five years ago, he started working in encaustic, Johns’s signature material. “So my work is perceived as reflective of Jasper’s,” he says. “But it’s figurative—very different.” Meanwhile, his family has had to adapt to his travel to Johns’s three studios (in Connecticut, St. Martin, and South Carolina) and various exhibitions. “It’s just part of the job,” he remarks.

On the other hand, John Currin insists that “it wouldn’t help me to have an assistant. I’d end up micromanaging to a degree that there would be no point. That’s like hiring someone else to drive a two-seater sports car. Why bother?” Still, he says, he has taken on an artist-bookkeeper who also straightens up. “My studio looked like Francis Bacon’s,” he admits. “Now it’s a much more pleasant place to be.”

"The Studio System" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents.