Being Alan Magee

The Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., explores the underlying logic and poetic continuity of a multimedia artist.

By: Amy Brummer

"Portrait of Fraz Kafka," digital photomontage, 1992, by Alan Magee.

   A retrospective can reveal surprising things about an artist. It gives a sense of perspective and boundary that can shed light on stylistic issues, historical context or personal motivation. In some cases, it can even provide a map of the creative mind.
   Alan Magee: Three Decades of Paintings, Sculpture and Graphics, on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., through Jan. 25, covers all of these bases. Moving gracefully between media and style, Mr. Magee delves into the hyper real and the abstract.
   The Cushing, Maine, resident grew up in Newtown, Pa., and graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1969. As an illustrator he produced covers for Graham Greene’s novel, Monsignor Quixote, and magazines such as Time, Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times.
   For Mr. Magee, this was a graduate school of sorts, teaching technical skills and giving him a sense of what he wanted to do with his career. He realized eventually that he needed to break away from this work if he was ever going to fully express his creativity.

"Dolmen," acrylic on canvas, 1986, by Alan Magee.

   "There was always an element of responding to someone else’s work," he says, "and I think, by example, these writers were showing me the way to be an artist was to write your own book."
   A collection of Mr. Magee’s work, Stones and Other Works, was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1987, and a catalog of this retrospective has been published by the Forum Gallery ($60). The current edition includes an introduction by Jonathan Weiner, who characterizes Mr. Magee’s artwork as "creative nonfiction." Mr. Weiner is visiting professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Beak of the Finch.

"Ned’s Cigar Store," egg tempura on masonite, 1972, also by Alan Magee.

   Mr. Magee has had solo shows at the Portland Museum of Art and the Michener, and has been honored with awards from The Maine Arts Commission Fellowship for Film and the National Design Academy. His work is held in numerous museum collections including the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, N.J., the Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., as well as the private collections of Johnny Carson and Lucasfilm Inc.
   Seeing his monotypes, stone paintings or sculptures in individual shows, it would be easy to assume the work was done by different people. Seen together, Mr. Magee’s artistic world becomes a singular creative universe with an underlying logic and a poetic continuity.
   "It is safe to say that it would have been better for my career not to have done so many things, because it confuses people," Mr. Magee says. "However, if I have to live that kind of life in a corral, I don’t think I would enjoy that. Even though this is the age of the signature style, it makes no sense to me, really, as a life worth living."
   In considering the exhibit as a whole, that is what makes it so captivating — it is the story of a life. It is not a direct narrative, but a tour through the brain of the artist.
   The exhibit offers two starting points: a linear chronology that begins with his childhood drawings and his earliest work as an illustrator; and a collection of his later monotypes — haunting images that shed light on his philosophical motivations.
   The latter option is an interesting place to begin, as the monotypes are perhaps the greatest departure from the realist work he had been creating for most of his career. But in the early 1990s, when the United States was on the brink of the first Gulf War, Mr. Magee felt his realist work seemed inappropriate. He wanted to capture the feelings of dread and uncertainty that defined the time.
   For that reason, the monotypes — single-impression prints derived from the erasure of black ink on a treated zinc plate — were created without the use of models or reference material. As he removed the pigment, Mr. Magee allowed spectral faces to emerge with their own personalities and sense of self. Stark against the inky blackness, their eyes are dark and clear when open, or shut with gentle sorrow. Some have sewn mouths, others have playful pointed ears.
   "Folded into them," Mr. Magee says, "is that there was a policy within the media — TV, photography — that nobody (in the Gulf conflict) was going to be shown hurt. This to me was sort of an escalation of the shrewdness of these operations, in that you take away the one means through which a person could feel empathy or an emotional response could be charged."
   Once released into the world, the monotypes took on their own life. Frank Dodge, a cellist from Berlin, arranged for them to be exhibited at the Berlin Philharmonic and composed a series of works, the "Monotype Improvisations." Author Barry Lopez has written nine narrative pieces inspired by the work that will be published as a novella in the spring.
   It is fitting that other artists would use Mr. Magee’s work as a reference point, as many of his efforts become a departure for other pieces. His triad of sculptures, "Family," gives three-dimensional form to images that spring from his monotypes. Members of that family then show up in his trompe l’oeil paintings as the face on a postage stamp. His sculpture, "No. 22 Alchemist’s St.," depicts a slumped, mutated man with a sweet, sad face and a pencil for an arm, standing dutifully in front of a building.
   The character shows up again in a precision portrait of the man, now in two-dimensional form standing in front of a childlike drawing of a skeleton. This skeleton bears surprising likeness to Mr. Magee’s childhood drawings, included in the show to illustrate how he has been exploring certain themes throughout his life.
   He says that his fascination with bones and skulls came at an early age and stemmed from a curiosity in anatomy. This provides an underlying current throughout the exhibit. Even in his departures from reality, there is a formal structure that carries each piece like a strong, bony frame.
   Among his anatomical sketches of bones and skulls, Mr. Magee’s humor becomes apparent. His sculpture of a minute skeleton is marked with the labels of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which houses an extensive collection of anatomical models that have been a draw for many artists.
   He has re-created this model with unerring detail, to the point where it appears to have come from the collection. The tag explaining that it is mixed media gives it away.
   "The reason it looks that way is that the difficulty of actually stealing one is insurmountable," he says. "Because you can’t have one of these, the only alternative was to make your own version.
   "You always have to make your own versions in life. You are inspired by something in the world but it doesn’t do just to snap it up. You need to work it through your own processes. It is serious and funny, and the idea that it could have been stolen was part of the humor of it."
   A similar sense applies to his exquisite portraits of simple objects — a wrench, spark plugs, a string of firecrackers. The pieces are all painted on board with the rich, textured patina of timeworn stone inspired by the walls of old buildings in European country villages. In isolating the image, it becomes elevated, a line of poetry scrawled across a sacred tablet to be admired and revered.
   "One of the things that a painter has to do is arrange things," he says, "not just so that you are not just saying ‘here.’ The arrangement extends the metaphor, it tells you what the thing is about. In some of these, pictures of spark plugs for example, people see family or social groups, actually to the point of where they have identified with individual spark plugs and told me, ‘I’m this one.’"
   Mr. Magee’s paintings of stones further reinforce this reverence to the power of contemplation that comes from looking deeply into a subject. The large paintings, measuring as much as 56-by-80 inches, depict a cascade of stones, worn smooth from the ocean water. In them you can see the myriad shapes, colors and textures of the earth’s geography, strata that tell hypnotizing and awe-inspiring stories of creation and evolution.
   "I guess I’m drawn to spend time with the things that are real," he says, "because of a bedrock belief that is where the amazing stuff is."
Alan Magee: Three Decades of Paintings, Sculptures and Graphics is on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, Pa., through Jan. 25. Hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m. Admission costs $6, $5.50 seniors, $3 students. There is an additional $4 charge for this exhibition. For information, call (215) 340-9800. On the web: www.michenerartmuseum.org