Alan Magee: art is not a solace, transcript

- [Reporter] The deadline has come and gone, the Iraqis are living on what President Bush calls "borrowed time." It is no longer whether the war will start, but when.

- [President Bush] Just two hours ago, allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged.

- For me, this was a time of intense dread. The justification for the war had been set, the media was on board and offered no alternative to the story. Not only were we not going to see any of the suffering or injuries in these bombed zones, we couldn't even look at the coffins of Americans coming back. This is the degree of censorship we were expected to accept. To be told we can't look at something, this, for an artist, is very disturbing—to take away the tools through which we can experience empathy, and those are pictures and stories. I was very happy as an illustrator for about a decade. I was in art school and wanted to continue in the fine arts, and I decided the Philadelphia College of Art would be right for me. What I did was to accept an invitation from the illustration department, and I knew absolutely nothing about that. I was immediately in the presence of some of the most talented young people that I've ever crossed paths with. One was a young man named Richard Amsel. He was a master at 18 years old. The Quay brothers, who became very famous filmmakers, were in my class. So all of a sudden, I was in this world of really creative people and I was finding out what illustration was. I and a number of other people like Richard Amsel and the Quay brothers had gone up to New York while we were still students and we began to get work. You could see almost any art director. I could go up in the morning with really no experience except a portfolio, call the art director of TIME and say, "I'm Alan Magee, I'm an illustrator, and I'm in town for the day, could I come by and show you my portfolio?" And, "Yeah, you can come by about two o'clock. I have some time."

- [Monika] It was a glorious time. There was so much work to be had for people that were responsible and would bring in exactly what was decided on.

- [Alan] I was not given a whole lot of direction. I could be given a book and be able to decide what was going to go into cover. The art directors trusted illustrators to read a book, so that was part of the illustrators role. And those freedoms weren't just an accident, they were there because the illustrator was needed. I would go to New York in the morning, usually deliver an illustration or two that I had done in the previous week, and then pick up new assignments. But in the afternoons, I was free and I would go to galleries. When I stepped into George Staempfli's gallery as a young illustrator, and stood in front of say a painting by Antonio Lopez Garcia, what I saw was just pure intensity, the kind of intensity that can only happen with the accrual of work over a long time. You can't do that, in an instant. It was impossible not to admire the way the painter had arranged his life to allow for this kind of time and attention to create a real work of art. It wasn't just that they were masterfully done, which they were, but there was a power that reached right off of the wall into my life and kind of insisting that I look at my own life differently. I needed to do what a man like Lopez Garcia was doing, making the space to look not just at the world, but inside of myself. When I first went to Pemaquid Point, it was like watching a turmoil in slow motion. The action of water moving stones over and against each other to create these incredible sculptural forms. When a new symbol or a new image appears in your life, at first, it isn't possible to understand what it means or what it is going to mean. The beauty of it kind of assaults you. It hits you with a walloping force, then you realize you're going to have to attend to it. The stones at Pemaquid Beach were really for me, the bridge out of illustrating. It was such an obvious antidote to illustrating. This timeless magnificently beautiful stone beach. It was so clear, this is what I needed and this was the answer to the chaos of constant assignments coming out of the New York publishers.

- Would you like one of my flowers?

- I think I was always attracted to things where I was getting a hint that somebody was telling me more of the truth. When I was in elementary school, and when all of our contemporaries were in elementary school, every effort was made to protect us from anything that could traumatize us. Every story that was told to us was softened to the point where it was essentially deadly boring. So when I was about 10, my friend Robin said, "There's something on TV that I think you've got to see." There's this character with hollowed out cheeks. He looks like a ghoul and then he shows these amazing horror films.

- Good evening, good evening, I'm Zacherle here, and I'm busy finishing my opera that I-

- [Alan] For me, this was exactly what was missing. A filled-out picture of human existence.

- He's just resting, waiting for a new life to come.

- The first one I saw was "Frankenstein," James Whale's "Frankenstein" with Boris Karloff. And that made a major impression. There was something just beautifully right about that. And it was, of course, macabre and appealing to a 10 year old in a variety of very obvious ways. But it's also a film filled with empathy. The themes of the outsider, of a person unable to be a part of the world. Bullying was a part of the movie, all these these themes that are part of life were in it as well.

- So the early horror films that we see, the silent films, the "Nosferatu," "Vampyr," "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "The Mummy," "The Invisible Man," even though maybe these movies have a subject matter that at the time was somewhat questionable, those were all very well-made A-budget movies.

- The artistry in these films was so attractive, so appealing that as an instinctive young artist, the beauty of the films really appealed to me. And I think that was maybe my first real introduction to literature, although people would argue it's not great literature, but on the other hand, the themes of great literature were present in these films. If you just think about "Frankenstein," an American film made in the thirties, I wasn't aware then that this was really German expressionism in exile. These films were made by people who knew what the German films of the twenties were. So the atmosphere, the sets, The remnants of expressionism were all there.

- Every film is a product of its time. I mean, probably in a more pronounced way during that time, because there was such an enormous artistic burst during the Weimar years. This was all a product of history. So the history of this time from the twenties to the thirties, is the reason why all of these people came.

- What music they make.

- I was afraid of the horror films, there's no use pretending otherwise. During the first months of "Shock Theater," my grandmother was living at our house by then, and she was kind of a fallback babysitter. We called her Mommy, and my grandmother, she would sit with me with her head averted to the extent that a head could turn around, away from the TV screen. Then occasionally, you would hear her say, "Alan, you're destroying your soul." When she said that, I thought, "It's too late, Mommy, it's too late."

- He has a way of taking what is common, a commonplace thing, and making it uncommon.

- You know, whether he's painting a tube of paint or a paint brush or his father's tools, or the way time has shaped it, the way the use of a hand has allowed it to accrue dignity.

- These all become for me, windows into something bigger, something to imagine the passing of time, to slow a viewer down. Also, that there might be an element of surprise that they're responding in such an engaged way to something that they know they would've passed up in an actual encounter.

- He's having a conversation that is informed by history and the passing of time and utility and the mechanization of the world. What you see when you see that painting is the record of a long conversation with an inanimate object.

- I think painting in that way is a meditation. And you know, he sneaky about it because he sneaks in his opposition to war and violence in very, very covert ways. Like having a stamp in the corner of one of these beautifully meditative pictures of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So anybody who knows Dietrich Bonhoeffer knows they have to reflect about violence and about opposition to power. I've often felt that people have what I call a third eye. They have a third eye that opens up and sees the truth more perceptively. Children have a big third eye and they haven't learned to close it, but we adults often keep ours closed. Alan makes us open it, and then we know things that we are refusing to know. And, you know, this is the thing about us human beings, that we can bear things if we can express them.

- [Monika] Alan's father had a service station in Washington Crossing, New Jersey.

- [Peter] Iconic, Hopper should've painted this gas station. He worked diligently in this place, it was spotless.

- [Alan] I think there is probably something of my father and what he did for me and what he left for me in terms of the way things work. There's no doubt in my mind that if I'm drawing a tool or a spark plug or anything having to do with an internal combustion engine, my father is very present in it.

- The gas station then had a lot of tourists coming out from Philly or down from New York. Right at the intersection of one of the bridges, there were writers for the "New York Times" and "The New Yorker." This was sort of like the horse country spot in-between New York and Pennsylvania, where there were tons of antique stores and art galleries and all that sort of stuff.

- [Alan] Looking back, I was, in a sense, perched between two worlds, the farm communities around us, the kids that came from working farms, and then a prosperous world of fieldstone farmhouses, and expansive beautiful, rolling landscape. So we knew about art. I wasn't in that world of arts. I was in some sense, you know, an ordinary mischievous teenager, but we could see, my friends and I could see that this world was all around us. If I hadn't ended up in in the art room of a Council Rock high school, I think my life would have turned out differently, certainly. There was a teacher there named Isabel Westberg, she took a personal interest in me and she could encourage and help me along the way. I don't think I would have understood what I could have built out of the things that I had already.

- [Reporter] The young American breed is swinging in that wider radius. The teenager has forsaken the parlor. The car dominates his life.

- Well, at about 13, 14 years old, I think it's particularly boys, they get interested in cars. I think if you grew up in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were certain things that you hoped you would get to do before you got blown up, and driving was one of them.

- [Peter] Ed Big Daddy Roth.

- [Alan] Yeah?

- [Peter] Do these have any meaning for you?

- Oh, I copied them all mercilessly. I look at his cars today and still see these were visual masterpieces. This was an artist of enormous skill, somebody the equivalent of what would be normally expected to end up in the great art museums of the time, but because he was kind of a lowlife in the world of art, that didn't happen, but there were people who could see it. He was probably the first artist that I ever saw at work. You know, it's like walking in on Rembrandt or something. It was that important. So I think a year later, I did take something that was a shameless copy of one of his pieces. I was a little shy to talk to Roth, and I should have been, given that I'd just stolen his style and idea, but showed him the piece, and Roth took a look at it and he said, "You're really gonna have to start thinking of your own ideas." He was a counter-cultural, raucous, by all appearances enormously self-confident guy who could draw just like an angel. A little counter-cultural, absolutely tailor-made for a 14 year old, with a slight outlaw cast to it. So I think it's also encouraging for young artists to see that it doesn't have to come out of an art history book.

- So Alan, at age 16, got a beautiful Ford, like exquisite thing, with glass packs. You know what glass packs are? You know the , the mufflers that make it sort of purr. Mint, mint. His father restored it, and of course, it ran like a top, which meant he's 16, he's got a car, and that's how he got Monika, if you want to know the truth. But then that was it, they disappeared. ♪ I saw the harbor lights ♪ ♪ They only told me we were parting ♪

- I was 15, he was 16. And we loved driving through the county, trying to get lost, trying to discover the roads, and we loved finding interesting places to draw together. Gasoline was 29 cents a gallon. So for a dollar, you could get three gallons of gas, which would take us all through the county.

- They did everything together. They walked the hall with each other. Never wore matching sweaters or anything like that, and you know, that kind of thing, but were inseparable.

- When I was a child, I was surrounded by everything I needed to draw, my mother made sure of that, and it was just there from the beginning. That's kind of what people did, that you drew pictures. My mother, she drew very well as a child, I mean, remarkably well.

- [Monika] Rena was Alan's mother's name. She said that if she couldn't draw during the day, she felt like she couldn't breathe.

- My mother grew up in a religious family. The family were Fundamentalists, particularly her mother, and her mother made a point of destroying my mother's drawings in front of her. They had a wood stove and my mother's drawings went into the wood stove to get the fire started. And my mother did ask her late in life, "Why did you throw those drawings away?" And her mother said, "I didn't want you to get a swelled head." And I think she took the extreme alternative route with me and wanted to make sure that if I had an inclination like she did, that I would have everything around me to work with. Drawing is always present, and whether it's an envelope or a piece of scrap paper or a Post-it Note, if I have a pencil and paper, or a pen and paper, I'm gonna start drawing on it. I was permitted to draw anything without an intervention. I was lucky that there weren't school psychologists intervening in my young life.

- He always drew—the doodling that I mentioned earlier. And I finally realized what he was doing. He was creating asymmetry in the faces, most particularly the faces, because the asymmetry is the emotion, or is the character, or is the twisted nature of somebody. And each one of them, it was like, "What would happen if you made the corner of the lip go up, or one nostril bigger than the other? And you see that even now in a lot of his prints where you get that exaggerated juxtaposition that is, in a sense, the opposite of beauty. It is asymmetry, but the power in that, it was, he was fascinated, he would just do that. Another face, another face, another face, he would cover every book he had. Back in the days of book covers. I don't know if they still do that.

- Doodling is the way I begin everything. Letting an idea come out through the pencil. Not pre-formed, I think you can't doodle with an intention. I think you need to do it almost preoccupied with something else, so that the body knows what needs to be said.

- I think people look at Alan Magee's work, one of the first things that the viewer sees is the incredible amount of skill. There's no question that he is somebody who's a master of his technique, whether it's in watercolor, whether it's an oil paint, the tapestries that he invents, the technical skill is incredible. Not only moving from medium to medium, but scale. Going from the small scale watercolors to these enormous scale paintings. And then, making monotypes that really defy the imagination in how they're created. I look at Alan's monotypes and I can't figure out how he does it.

- I'll never forget it, the feelings that I had seeing these monotypes for the first time. They just didn't leave me alone all night long. I think I may have said something even back then, that it would be wonderful if we could bring these monotypes to Berlin because I felt they were something that people here would want to look at, and could look at. And that's why I wrote some of these Monotype Improvisations for Solo Cello. It seems almost as though they have a disarming quality, they reach people without being invited.

- When I looked at those faces that Alan created, I felt these two words: me too.

- When I'm working on the monotypes, I'm finding that it's just instinctive to come out with something where the pathos is there, where the injury is there, the suffering can be made clear, but at the same time, it isn't a moment of shrieking anguish. What I want is something that has the lasting qualities of an altarpiece, that you can go back to it repeated times and find an open door to the things that are dark and distressing, that don't take away any possibility of hope.

- I found those faces demanding in the way that art should be demanding. There's a degree of pleading with the viewer to be understood as another human being who's suffering in the way that you're suffering. They're beautiful in the sense that they're so profoundly human.

- When I make one of those black and white monotypes, I'm always in doubt about what's going to happen. There's a high probability that it isn't going to come out. The outcomes are completely subject to chance. So what I'm looking for when that image first comes off from the metal plate to a piece of paper, what I'm looking for is something believable as a human life. Some of them aren't. There might be an anatomically feasible conjunction of eyes, nose, and mouth, but it doesn't convince me that a life has caused those features to fall into place in that way. Other times, even if the piece is hopelessly crude, I might find this indication of something that looks like a real being that kind of conjures up for me a history, a temperament.

- Maybe over the whole of human history, we've always had to have people who were more of our conscience than we naturally are inclined to be.

- I don't know how it is for other people. I don't know how easy it is to put that out of one's mind, but I find that I am kind of haunted by things that I know about in life. Not that I seek them out, I'm not a real activist, and I think any genuine activist would be able to see that. I'm an artist, but on the other hand, I think life comes right through your walls, right into where you're living and working. And particularly today, it takes a real effort to remain innocent.

- [Barry] I think the mistake you could make is to believe that this person who created these sometimes terrifying images is fixated on what's wrong with humanity. What he's fixed on is: what does it mean to be human?

- If you're willing to look, if you're willing to sustain the gaze of his monotypes, it is entirely about empathy. It is not just empathy for the people portrayed in them, but there's also a kind of empathy for history, for history that has been unbelievably cruel, but is now out of reach—a kind of sad nostalgia for something that you can't go back and fix.

- There's a wonderful line from, I think it is from Isaiah. No, it's from the Psalms. "Darkness is not dark to you, O Lord. Darkness and light to you are both alike."

- You can't just stare at what is conventionally beautiful. You must look at the whole panorama, and the Panorama includes a little boy setting fire to an animal.

- I think that small boy under the night sky aspect of Alan's life would really be close to, if not unbearable, without Monika as fellow traveler with him, and her own stalwart, sturdy courage and pragmatism.

- Monika is everywhere in all of this. We met in high school, and I think what I recognized in her was a person that kind of understood everything. One of the early things I witnessed was her in a cafeteria filled with boys taunting a young guy, they were tossing his hat around, and somehow she jumped out there and caught the hat in midair and took it to him and reduced everybody in the room to silence. Who is this? Who is this girl who did that?

- I remember seeing a cartoon about a person being a balloon just floating up in the sky and they need the person who's holding onto the string and keeping it to the ground. And that's kind of Monika.

- She was kind of cautioned about me by her parents. And although her parents did not see me as the candidate anywhere near what they would have imagined, she took a chance and married me before I had really done any significant number of illustration jobs. So we just started that profession together. She would come to New York with me often. She knew all the art directors. She learned to develop pictures in a darkroom so that if we photographed models, she could do that part of the work. She often helped me when the reading got really overwhelming. She would read and kind of write up synopses of various books that we could go back and look at things for symbolism. I think there's seldom a work of mine that's gone out into the world that we haven't looked at together. And it's just invaluable to me to have her input into the things that I'm doing. She will often, often notice something that needs attention on a painting, that I didn't see. It's the enormous gift of having the perfect proofreader or copy editor for a writer, that she can look at a piece and have a good idea of what I had in mind and be able to help me to bring it around. I was in Santa Barbara looking for something to read, so I went into a bookstore there and found a very unremarkable-looking book, a little gray paperback called "Winter Count." I didn't know who Barry Holstun Lopez was. I started to read them and I had a sense this was a very unusual kind of writer.

- So Alan and I met at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and Monika, his wife, came up to me and said, "Excuse me, I'm Monika Magee, and my husband would like to meet you but he's too shy to come up and introduce himself, so I'm going to bring you to him."

- I told Barry that I had a painting in New York at a gallery, and he wanted to know a little bit about what I was doing. Remarkably, he went over to the gallery and saw it and got back in touch with me and that's how our friendship began. And very soon after that, we found a way to interact with the various kinds of work we were doing. Barry also took a very early interest in this realm of social commentary. Those things looked so different, of course, from the realism that I was showing at my New York gallery. Barry wanted to know about it. I think he sensed right away that there was something of interest for him in an artist doing these two very different kinds of work.

- In many ways, I think of my relationship with Alan as two men standing on a cliff, looking out into the inexplicable world and saying to each other, "What do you think?" And what he thinks becomes apparent when he creates something on a canvas. And what I think becomes apparent when I write a story, and then I give him the story, and he gives me the painting, and each guy says, "Yeah, yeah." I think that there are a couple of things that we share. One is a kind of instinct to respond to injustice and a desire to explore the complexity of what it means to be a full-blown human being. Both of us are acutely sensitive to issues like social injustice. In my overall work, I'm more focused on environmental injustice of one sort or another. It's the conundrum of injustice. What fuels it, how do we deny it, and what are its roots? How in responding to those situations as a writer or a painter, an artist, how in responding to those things, are we doing our part? How well are we responding to the times that we live in? Part of the world that the artist or the writer occupies is the dangerous ground between the known and the unknown. And there's always an element of the rejection of the known by an artist or a writer, a kind of resistance to status quo. The personality I'm talking about is a kind of negotiator with darkness, so that they step into it and put themselves at risk in it in order to bring back a coherent story or a piece of art that allows a person who is housing those same fears to say, "Well, okay now, okay, I've been reminded what I really stand for in the world. I'm good, I'm all right." It seems to me the highest compliment you can pay to an artist or a writer is to say, "I was exposed to your work, and afterward, I felt more coherent. I felt I understood, again, what I mean by my life."

- [Singer] Let me hear it one more time.

- [Producer] Sure, you got it, here you go.

- He's doing something funky. ♪ Will there be rhythms and harmonies and rhymes ♪ ♪ And harmonies and rhymes ♪ Okay, that's it.

- [Producer] Okay, here it comes.

- Okay. All right, take one. ♪ Will there be singing in the dark times to come ♪ ♪ Will brash, unbridled evil ♪ ♪ Cloud our wits and strike us dumb ♪ ♪ Will there be rhythms and harmonies and rhymes ♪ ♪ Will there be songs ♪ ♪ Will we be singing ♪ ♪ In the dark times ♪ ♪ When the demons have been loosed and dressed like men ♪ ♪ They were only names in a history book ♪ ♪ But they've come back again ♪ ♪ With play things that they've never had before ♪ ♪ So I'm gonna sing till I can't sing anymore ♪ ♪ There will be singing in the dark times to come ♪ ♪ We won't let evil cloud our wits ♪ ♪ Nor will it strike us dumb ♪ ♪ We'll have rhythms and harmonies and rhymes ♪ ♪ There will be songs ♪ ♪ And we'll be singing ♪ ♪ In the dark times ♪ ♪ There will be songs ♪ ♪ And we'll be singing ♪ ♪ In the dark times ♪

- When I began making the sculpture, I more or less just started putting things together, just to see what would happen. If you start putting old bits or fragments of things that are rusty and corroded together, it's a great opportunity for something a little strange to come out. It's very similar to how a very crudely-drawn face can evoke a whole personality. It's also true that a gesture put together by a few odd bits of found materials can evoke a whole life. The kind of just whimsical things that I began with began to change and evolve into things that, where I was able to put some of what I was after with the monotypes, into sculpture. There's something, for me, kind of touching about making a figure that can at least hint at the story of what remains of a person after experiencing a extremely traumatic series of events in a war situation to use instead of clay or established art materials, to build this thing out of discards. I think what I'm trying to give voice to in the war toys is an antidote to a whole cultural idea that takes unpleasant truths and make them very hard to unearth.

- If you think about some of his little sculptural pieces like his war toys, okay, you want your kids to play with real war toys? Well, here's one.

- One thing Alan and I have gone back and forth about for many years is: are we or are we not activists? And neither one of us will turn up at a barricade, but we both regard ourselves as actively involved in resisting the things that destroy life. Part of what you're trying to do as an artist in contemporary time is break down the cynicism and detachment with which too much art and too much life is met. There's quite a lot to be said about individual vision and following that vision. And that's what all of us do. The thing I don't hear discussed very often is it's all well and good for you to follow your artistic vision, but what about us? What about the social responsibility of somebody whose life is an artistic expression? And from my point of view, as a writer, what my culture needs, my people, the part of the world I'm a part of need is the story. It's the story that carries people through the difficult periods in their lives. Your responsibility is to reify, to turn into something real, a painting or a story, the difficulty of day to day life in the world, whatever pocket of the world you find yourself in. Alan and I don't feel that the world needs our political opinions. What the world, we believe, needs is our determined articulation of the complexity of human life, both the light in it, and the darkness.

- I think I became interested in Germany really concurrent with meeting Monika and realizing that she had a German family. And I found this shelf of books of art between the wars. Otto Dix, John Heartfield, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz. I can remember it just having that feeling when your skin is reacting. How is it I didn't know about this? This is strong, powerful, wonderful, humane stuff. So I think from that moment on, I realized I'm gonna have to live in this world a little bit with these artists. What's usually referred to as the Weimar Republic or the Weimar years in Germany is a period between 1919 and 1933, when the Nazis came to power. It's called the Weimar Republic because the new constitution was written in the city of Weimar. The delegates to this convention wanted to get out of Berlin with all the shouting and political rancor and contention, and meet in this culturally revered city of Goethe and Schiller, and in that calm, to write a just constitution. There were artists working in the twenties in Germany who really believed that the work they were doing played a vital part in creating a better society. The playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, the artists, George Grosz and Otto Dix, and the composers, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, and the pacifist, Ernst Friedrich, really saw their work as a part of a social project. Friedrich created, in about 1922, an anti-war museum in Berlin and put together a book called "War Against War" that was meant to be a lasting testament to what the aftermath of a war was really like, what the injuries were like, what the lingering grief would be like for the survivors.

- [Harris] Well, I think World War I ended differently than World War II. It was a war of great horror and, really, senselessness.

- I like to think about art or expression where you feel like you're really getting the full picture. You may not like the, maybe this person doesn't have the best bedside manner you've ever experienced, but I know I'm hearing the truth. Well, that's what you got from these Weimar artists. And they knew what they were doing, they knew. They called it the New Sobriety or the New Objectivity.

- And people had to speak the truth now. And they called it , the New Objectivity. We can't be romantic anymore, we can't be subjective anymore about these things. We have to tell the truth about things.

- They came out of this romantic dream of patriotism and loyalty and being the right kind of good citizen. Well, they were gonna be any kind of citizens they wanted, and they were gonna tell anybody who would listen, what things were like.

- George Grosz called himself George Grosz rather than Georg Grosz, because he wanted to say, "I'm not a German." John Heartfield, who is Johann Herzfeld called himself John Heartfield because of the war. He said, "You know, I'm no longer a German. I'm gonna call myself by the enemy's name, the English version of my name." He was the great collage artist. He has some of the, I would say, some of the best posters against Hitler that were ever made. So satirically dead on. They were mocking what was holy, they were mocking what was noble and reducing it to something ugly. It caused a backlash, too. I mean, we have the Nazi rise to power was partly fueled by a kind of disgust with this expose of reality and saying that it was degenerate. You know, we've all heard the Nazis called it degenerate art. And Friedrich's book, of course, is a book about objectivity. It's about looking at things honestly. The first thing the Nazis did when they were coming to power in 1933, '34, when they were winning power, the first thing they did was seize his museum and turn it into a Sturmabteilung headquarters, you know, for the SA—Brownshirts. That's how much they hated what he was doing. And they saw what he was doing as the antithesis of what they were about. One of the lessons of the New Objectivity was that one of the things that had gotten them into the war was culture acting as a kind of escapism or a kind of romanticization of things. And they wanted to make you take a step back when you were looking at art and become critical. Brecht wrote a great thing later, but it helps explain this. He said, "I went to see a Hollywood film, 'Gunga Din,'" and he said, "I hate imperialism. You know, I hate the British empire. I hate the mistreatment of other peoples, of people who were considered inferior to the imperialists, and there I was cheering at all the right moments, cheering for these British soldiers, cheering when the evil Indian meets his fate, crying for the Indian who actually sells out his own people to help the British conquer them," you know? He said, "I wept at the right times, I laughed at the right times, I cheered at the right times. That is dangerous culture. That is the use of culture to corrupt people."

- One of the artists that worked during that time, Käthe Kollwitz, is a real hero of mine. She was a fantastic artist, but also had this great heart. About 2000, I went to Berlin for the first time, for an exhibition, and went into the Käthe Kollwitz Museum there.

- On Fasanenstrasse in Berlin, and walked through the museum, beautiful lithographs. Some of her sculptural maquettes were there. And Alan walked in front of one of her drawings. It's a self portrait of Käthe, she's looking directly at the viewer.

- Not a perfect drawing, but I felt a genuine connection between myself… I felt as if I was, in an odd way, in her presence.

- And I think he was riveted by her gaze. And as he described it to me, it was as if, "Well, what are you going to do?"

- I think that changed something. I think that there was a resolve that happened in having that kind of facsimile of a real encounter with a person. On rare occasions, art can work in such an intense, strong way that you really can encounter the maker through the work. As it turned out, she lost her son, Peter, in the Fist World War. And he was one of these young men virtually recruited by the teachers at that time that would shame young men into signing up. When her son died, she vowed to make a memorial. 18 years later, she did complete a work, and it is a stunning war memorial. And I think it stands at the pinnacle, for me, of what a war memorial could be. This sculpture has clearly two parents separated on two pedestals, distant from each other, each one in a posture of apparent, just bottomless grief. And what it also says in its separateness is that this situation, which by that time, she knew very well, can't be shared. The the two grievers can't comfort each other in any meaningful way. She died of natural causes, but in a kind of sad state. It was in '45, and by that time, the Nazis had realized she was not one of their favorite artists and she had been stripped of all her honors, her work was taken out of museums, and she was no longer allowed to teach. And in '45, with Berlin in shambles, it was not clear at all that there was gonna be any light coming anytime soon. To dare some act of dissent here is relatively safe. We don't have anything that resembles what it would have been like just to make the work that she did in Nazi Germany. The price you paid was, at a minimum, having your professional life dismantled. The worst, you could be killed. Nevertheless, there are these things that still go on, perhaps out of our sight. We need that same kind of example of people like Kollwitz to at least show us that it's never over.

- It's not happenstance that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is so important to him. I think that capacity to speak truth to power when power was menacing, truly menacing, is deeply important to Alan.

- There was a book called "Prophets Without Honour" that I read long before I knew anything about these Weimar artists. And it was about Kafka and Einstein and people whose lives drew them into this period of turmoil in the mid 20th century. These playwrights and all of these people were passionate about doing whatever they could in writing and pictures to warn people about the cost of obedience, the impossibility of getting off of that train once you've stepped onto it. If we sign up, if we sign the contract or agree to this life of art, well, we're gonna be pulled by it. Vaclav Havel, when he describes what it was like to be called “an enemy of the people”. Well, he said, "It starts by trying to do your work well," and I keep thinking about that. "It starts by trying to do your work well."

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