The Problems of Partnership
Our most treasured artistic products are often linked to the “genius” artist. But, more often than not, a great work bears the mark of another hand. Some form of collaboration has existed in all the great artistic movements, even though history has a way of forgetting certain co-creators.
In its Spring 2018 exhibition, + The Art of Collaboration, the Beinecke takes on its own remembering of certain processes and products of American artistic collaboration. The exhibition is a three-part experience, with the ground floor assigned to the “The Children’s Books of Russell and Lillian Hoban,” the curved cases on the second floor allocated to “Richard Wright’s Native Son on Stage and Screen,” and the vitrines displaying 100 years of American literary and artistic collaboration, under the heading “Studies in Creativity.”
On the ground floor, the audience gets the chance to meet Russell and Lillian Hoban, the husband-wife pair behind a series of famed 1960s children’s books, with Mr. Hoban as author and Ms. Hoban as illustrator. For some visitors, children’s books might be a surprising genre to find in as serious a setting as the Beinecke. Yale students may be tempted to scoff when the curation quotes a passage from the Hobans’ The Mouse and His Child, in which a pair of clockwork mice seek to become “self-winding,” (‘“What are we Papa?” asks the mouse child. “I don’t know,” the mouse replies. “We must wait and see.”’) and invites the audience to consider the same questions. Despite the juvenile subject matter, the exhibition pushes its audience to treat the toy mice’s quest for autonomy and identity with the same care we might treat the struggle of Holden Caulfield in an English class. By the end, visitors, especially Yale students, might recognize how academic spaces spend little time acknowledging the importance of children’s books in psychological development or the creative understandings to be gained from studying them.
Ms. Hoban’s illustrations were fundamental to converting these abstract, adult themes into accessible, children’s characters. The New York Times asserted in a review of The Mouse and His Child that the story is deeply and almost inextricably associated with Ms. Hoban’s illustrations. However, the archival materials displayed in the exhibit do not convey the same viewpoint. The text panels are overwhelmingly dedicated to analyzing Mr. Hoban’s creative process; Ms. Hoban’s drawings merely serve as accompaniments, haphazardly scattered throughout the cases. A 1988 playbill for the stage adaptation of The Mouse and His Child credits “Russell Hoban’s book” and the melée of characters he invented. Ms. Hoban is unmentioned.
Ms. Hoban is by no means left out of this exhibition, as in the playbill, but she is indisputably relegated to playing a supporting role to her husband’s main act. This is clear in the uneven presentation of each of the Hobans’ independent careers. While illustrators are often less acknowledged than authors, even Ms. Hoban’s self-authored, widely popular Arthur’s Prize Reader series, written after her divorce with Mr. Hoban, is hardly documented. Meanwhile, a manuscript is displayed for What Does It Do and How Does It Work, Mr. Hoban’s self-authored and unsuccessful children’s book published before he began his creative collaboration with Ms. Hoban. The one manuscript that is shown, out of the dozens Ms. Hoban produced during her independent career, is of the book she co-wrote with her daughter Phoebe, and the label for the piece reads: “Russell Hoban’s hope that his daughter would go into the family business was realized.” Even here, Lillian Hoban is a character in the curtains.
The Beinecke displays various letters exchanged between the Hobans and their editors and adaptors, so that the exhibition thoroughly engages with the process of creating. Unfortunately, no letter in the exhibition is authored by Ms. Hoban and seldom is she included as an addressee. An overwhelming majority of selected quotes from the Hobans, displayed in text panels, are Mr. Hoban’s words, including an explanation of Ms. Hoban’s coloration process and how he highly values it. Of course, lack of archival material may be the reason for these shortcomings in the narrative of Ms. Hoban’s career. However, given the history of ignoring a long line of women in artistic partnerships, whether in the role of muse (in the case of Lee Miller, muse of Man Ray), co-creator (as in the case of Zelda Fitzgerald, whose husband, F. Scott stole diary entries for his novels) or even sole creator (as in the case of Margaret Keane, who was denied credit for her extremely successful “big-eyes” paintings by her husband Walter), the overlooking of Lillian Hoban is unfortunate.
In disregarding the gender dynamics within the Hoban partnership, the Beinecke falls short of delivering a more thought-provoking exploration of collaboration. However, the same mistake is not made upstairs, in “Richard Wright’s Native Son on Stage and Screen”, which acknowledges the racial dynamics at play in this collaboration. (Admittedly, it would be difficult to leave out race in a discussion of Wright’s story, which follows Bigger, an African-American man who murders a white woman and his black girlfriend under the stress of a white supremacist regime.) The division of the Wright exhibition into stage and screen works well, each emphasizing the difficult relationship between the African-American Wright and two of his white collaborators: A southerner, Paul Green, the writer for the stage adaption of Native Son, and Pierre Chenal, a European, the director of the film adaptation.
The Beinecke carefully takes its audience through the process of adaptation, demonstrating how the material was twisted and pulled in different directions by the different collaborators, in concurrence with the meaning each wanted the Native Son to espouse. Green, we learn, tried to turn the stage-version of Bigger into a delusional, “reverse-Christ” figure, to fit in with his moralist religious perspective. Even more shocking to us, however, is the mutilation of the screen-version of Bigger into a ferocious brute. The poster for the Spanish version of the 1951 film adaption, titled Sangre Negra (“Black Blood”), features a black man with his hand over the mouth of an idealized white, blonde woman, his hold on her reminiscent of posters for the 1933 film King Kong. The Beinecke highlights the irony of the use of the word “terrifying” in a poster for the United Kingdom release that read, “Exploding onto the screen! Savage! Terrifying!”, given that Wright’s original novel was about the terror Bigger experienced at the hands of a racially oppressive system and the horrors of capitalist individualism. (The Beinecke does not, however, address the use of the word “savage.”)
By taking us through the arguments between collaborators which led to the omissions and alterations of certain scenes and characters, the Beinecke is able to use collaboration as a meaningful mechanism in studying the racial tensions of the 1940s and 1950s. Collaboration thus becomes fascinating precisely because of the tensions between collaborators.
The third part of the exhibition, Studies in Creativity, has less success in capturing the relationships involved in collaboration. Certain vitrines, while listing the names of collaborators at the top of the panel, give no information about the distinct individuals behind the project being displayed, such as the case highlighting the Victory Garden Collective, the group behind the Miss sashes at the 2016 Women’s March. An undistinguished entity stands behind the artistic product, making the display a study in creation, rather than collaboration. But other vitrines, like that showing the joint Exquisite Corpse drawing by Pablo Picasso and Saul Steinberg, or the one displaying The Brakhage Scrapbook, in which Jane Brakhage artistically documents her husband’s film career, demonstrate the marks of distinct individuals on a shared piece of art. This is where the true value of studying collaboration lies.
