Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Beijing, Khartoum, Lahore, Tokyo: all over the world, artists formed collectives in the 20th century. While the tendency to form groups was (and is) universal, the concerns of their members, their aesthetic methods, political goals and utopian aspirations are fundamentally different depending on time and place. The influence of collaborative work processes has been studied only fragmentarily in art history. This book explores the emergence and development of collectives against the backdrop of their respective social and cultural contemporaneity.