A lot of talented people leave Philadelphia. Edgar Allen Poe, who edited "Gentleman's Magazine," finished his life in Baltimore. John F. Timoney, former police commissioner now polices in Miami. Marc Blitzstein ran off to politicize Broadway. A Kansas City businessman bought the Athletics from Connie Mack and moved them to Oakland.

One of such famous persons, Alan Magee who was born in Newtown in 1947, left Philadelphia in 1969 for New York City to become a book illustrator. Later, he became a Realist painter. He relocated to Cushing, Maine with his wife Monika, twenty-four years ago.

"There is no doubt that I find some of the space, some part of that contemplative remove that I'm after in this quiet and beautiful place," Mr. Magee said about down-east Maine.

"However," he added, "Philadelphia exercised a powerful formative influence on my work."

The fifty-six year-old Mr. Magee will open the first Philadelphia retrospective of his work at the Wachovia Gallery of Doylestown's Michener Museum on October 25th in the show entitled, "Alan Magee: Three Decades of Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphics."

When he was four years-old, Mr. Magee began to copy drawings that his older brother Richard had rendered in an anatomical drawing class at Council Rock High School. Art teacher Isabel Westberg, introduced the younger Mr. Magee to the works of the old masters. She gave her protégé his own "studio" in the 'L' section at the rear of the classroom, where the twelfth grader was commissioned to compose portraits of each seventh grader.

"Ms. Westberg, who still lives in the Philadelphia area, so believed in my talent that she accompanied me when I applied to the Tyler School of Art," Mr. Magee said.

At the exhibit, there will be three drawings composed when he was a child, attending the Newtown Joint Elementary School.

"At 11:30pm, I used to watch Philadelphian John Zacherle playing Roland in 'Shock Theatre' on WCAU television, doing ingenious ad lib performance art with Thelma the Amoeba, a creature made of gelatin wrapped in cheesecloth," Mr. Magee said.

He would collect the magazine published in north Philadelphia, "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a collectible cited in Stephen King's On Writing as one of the novelist's earliest influences.

"This publication helped me to see that there was a fascinating world outside of the enclosed world of suburbia. I was always looking for inspiration," Mr. Magee reminisced.

"Philadelphia opened up to me, when I was looking for mystery," he continued, "Its dark alleyways and old walkways have hidden moods. For such atmosphere it beats other big cities, New York included."

One only needs to examine his photomontage series named, "Nachtmusik," to sense both the impact of Philadelphia monster media, and, the speedy effect wielded by the hot rod illustrators whom Mr. Magee mentions he witnessed working at the old convention center.

The chilling figures wearing business suits in "Nachtmusik," are unspeakably savage. Playfulness reminiscent of the photomontages of Hannah Höch resounds with the black and white shock value which characterized "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Nosferatu," to name three more of Mr. Magee's influences.

"I composed the 'Nachtmusik' work during the Reagan and elder Bush years to express capitalist predations and the venom lurking beneath the tailored suits," he explained.

The Michener show will also display the "Archive Monotypes." This is a series of black and white faces, which are impressions made by painting the subject matter onto a smooth metal printmaking plate, then transferring them to dampened paper and employing an etching press.

"The monotypes are examples of an ultra-Realist doing more with less," said Michener President and CEO Bruce Katsiff.

The results are ovular, stone-like human faces, bereft of most detail, which in betraying not a hint of the spirit of the sitter (as in a Holbein portrait), nevertheless seem vulnerable and meek.

"Alan, who is a superbly skillful Realist, powerfully draws back from detail and concentrates on the general scale of the human condition," said Mr. Katsiff.

The resulting deformed faces display frailties similar to the doleful countenances seen in charcoal portraits by Kate Kollwitz. Mr. Magee began them in the months before the first Gulf war.

"Breaking from our homework while attending the Philadelphia College of Art," said Mr. Magee, "my friends and I would take long walks along South Broad Street or scout out the Mutter Museum or wander late at night along the navy yard."

Attributable to the "shadows" and "mystery" of Philadelphia may be the fact that Mr. Poe penned some of his darkest prose in Center City.

After briefly attending the Tyler School of Art and then Bucks County Community College, Mr. Magee finished the last two years of his bachelors at the Philadelphia College of Art.

"When I became old enough to hitchhike, my friends and I would visit the old convention center hot rod show to watch Big Daddy Roth and Stanley Mouse airbrush their hot rod monsters," Mr. Magee recounted.

Mr. Mouse who later became the Grateful Dead letterer, and Mr. Roth who financed his hot rod building through tee shirt sales, would sit side by side while painting. Robert Crumb has also mentioned watching from the audience.

"Roth would paint his Rat Fink on tee shirts and Mouse would paint Freddy Flypogger on sweatshirts," Magee said.

Mr. Magee pointed out that the tee shirts cost only two dollars back then. Today, like many of the "Famous Monsters" magazine back issues, they sell high at auctions.

"Art offered an extreme antidote to the pallor of suburban life when I was growing up," explained Mr. Magee. "I identified with filmmaker Wim Wenders' rescuing himself from the banality of his post war environment by finding rock and roll and American pop culture. It was like that for me too."

A section in the Wachovia Gallery will be dedicated to childhood drawings.

"I am underscoring the importance which formative years have on the creative process. It is sad that art educators seem to feel that primitive influence is better put aside," Mr. Magee said.

"By the time Mr. Magee entered the Philadelphia College of Art," Mr. Katsiff said, "Realism was out of vogue. Alan suffered in those days because Realists were not taken seriously."

Mr. Magee, who left college a few credits short of graduation, began working in 1969 as an editorial and book illustrator in New York.

"Back when Irving Sandler dubbed abstract expressionism to be the 'triumph of American painting', the freeing of art from subject and commentary was considered to be both un-political and hence safe," explained Mr. Magee, who resisted complaining that he suffered for his ultra-Realism.

"I'll just say that there were so many of us in college who didn't go with the program," he allowed, offering, "The Philadelphia College of Art wasn't sure what kind of a future I and the other illustrators might have."

Meanwhile, the art world was embracing Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Ad Reinhard, Jackson Pollock, "and the other Abstract Expressionists," Mr. Magee said.

Where to place the young Mr. Magee and his friends would be decided solely by the superb talent of these illustrators. Occupying a program which Mr. Magee calls, "only about thirty of us in one, small place," his classmates Timothy and Stephen Quay would soon become two of the most influential animators in film. Junior- and Senior-year classmate Richard Amsel (later known to be Bette Midler's favorite artist) designed the "Hello Dolly," "Sting" and "Indiana Jones" movie posters. Ten of Oil Painter Marvin Mattleson's portraits are now in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian. Ivan Barnett's updated-folk-style decorates lobbies and galleries in the southwest and the American embassy collection in Tanzania. Anne Meisel, a senior-year classmate, illustrated album covers throughout the seventies and eighties and is now employed at Lucasfilm. Also, Paul Hogarth was Mr. Magee's professor one semester.

"When it seemed that innovation had become an end in itself, the art world's pushing of non-objective painting caused Realism to become eclipsed," Mr. Magee recalled. "I was sure that my work should become, by contrast, more social and human."

Mr. Magee referred to Peter Fuller's 1983 book, Aesthetics After Modernism, where the late critic wrote, "good art can only be realized when a creative individual encounters a living tradition with deep tendrils in communal life." In practice, Mr. Magee invigorated Realism by injecting a significance which Modernist critics had claimed had become lost in Realists' editorializing of the human condition.

To Mr. Fuller and Mr. Magee, there can be no denying the picture plane's ability to communicate through the naturalism. The artist's freedom which Mr. Fuller had said, is "restricted solely to aesthetic questions," does not, adds Mr. Magee, "allow the artist decide which type of art ought to become America's 'triumph' and which should not." Mr. Magee affirmed, "Neither the artwork, the artist, nor the critic is that powerful."

As time progressed, Robert Indiana's 1960 "Love" sculpture in JFK Park and Nelson Rockefeller's decision to destroy Diego Rivera's mural never dammed the tide of Realism. Realists such as Phillip Pearlstein and Lenart Anderson began to have their day. This year, the Gross McLeaf Gallery on Sixteenth Street, recently dedicated an entire show to paintings composed by students of Mr. Anderson.

"Today, Realists have a much easier time of it," Mr. Katsiff rejoined.

Seeing Philadelphia's new good-attitude murals of heroism, community spirit and celebrity that have replaced the WPA interior Social Realism murals which bemoaned the Great Depression, one acknowledges the stunning syntactical achievements but realizes that Realism still has a long way to go.

"Alan has deeply held passions about the human condition," said Mr. Katsiff. "He has the incredible technical ability with which to express these passions and the subtlety with which to avoid throwing political issues in the viewer's face."

Mr. Magee makes the picture plane look like a photograph. His subjects, such as an old putty knife in the painting, "Diary," advertise themselves in direct light, centralized as F.W. Murnau framed his characters in "Nosferatu." Surrealism in the digital photography montage portraits of Wilfred Owen and Frederick Sommer, suggests misery without disparaging the subjects, much in the way that Ben Shahn portrayed American poverty satirically in his photograph, "The Wife and Child of the Sharecropper."

"Owen" resembles the hybrid of a larvae and a mummified infant; while "Sommer," is a head set upon a tumorous anthropomorphic glob of molten metal superimposed over Leonardo DaVinci's cartoon, "Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John." The style is darkly comedic but also touchingly poignant.

"Never making direct political statements in his artwork, Alan backs away from details of the social issues he is exploring, concentrating on the general rather than the specific, whereby the viewer gains the fullest possible understanding of the social elements," Mr. Katsiff explained.

In the "Tromp L'oeil" section of the exhibit, the viewer greets the ultra-Realism through which Mr. Magee explains that simple objects claim to have souls.

"I call these paintings, 'surrogates'," Mr. Magee said, clarifying that a panel like "Diary," which is an acrylic painting of an old putty knife, substitutes for spiritual existence, its body haggard with experience and its face of paint and cement smears a record of dignity.

"Natural History," which is a painting of a set of four wrenches, Mr. Magee said, "explains my process of arranging objects to paint and finding correspondences to human relationships in these arrangements." The wrenches are arranged in a seeming hierarchy, whose mouths are open at varying widths, two of which are fading into translucency or obscurity.

Paintings of gaggles of stones, panels of a power drill, spark plugs, and three tubes of paint, are some of the still life paintings causing the viewer to do double-takes deciding whether what he sees are photographs. "Alan has a Zen-like ability to make us comprehend through his painting of ordinary items such as old tools, the way in which people relate to one another," Mr. Katsiff said.

"Alan has a Zen-like ability to make us express through painting ordinary items like old tools, the way in which people relate to one another," Mr. Katsiff said.

"In the best and worst societies," Mr. Magee remarked, "it is all about how people treat one another."

Critic John Canaday befriended Mr. Magee following the writer's review of the artist's first solo exhibition in New York in 1980. Mr. Canaday, having long waved the banner for the abstract camp, wrote in his article, "A Dazzling New Realist Painter" in the Saturday Evening Review, that Mr. Magee's Realism was a "genuinely modern movement, not a relapse."

Mr. Canaday was referring to the pratfall reversion toward salon priggishness which Mr. Magee's Realism had eluded.

The veteran illustrator of six Time Magazine covers was now lunching with the Modernist fogey. Mr. Magee had suddenly converted Realism into the Avant-Garde.

"Alan is one of the only artists whom I know, who successfully made the transition from illustration to fine art," Mr. Katsiff added.

"It was a Bucks County Realist landscape painter named Bob Seurfert who had told me that I should start 'to illustrate Alan Magee'," recollected Mr. Magee who mentioned that he loathes the term, "fine art."

"It sounds as if somebody is trying to claim one kind of art is better than another," he said.

A section of the gallery will be dedicated to Mr. Magee's 1970's illustrations, including the Time Magazine covers, illustrations done for "Playboy," "Atlantic Monthly," the "New York Times," and the cover of the book, The Best of John Sladek.

Mr. Magee said that the natural beauty of Maine helped inspire him to make the quantum leap.

"The stone beaches near Cushing were an enormous influence. They were the bridge leading out of my illustration work to the work I do today," said Mr. Magee whose paintings of stones will occupy an ample part of the Wachovia space.

"Writer Barry Lopez named a wing of Alan's studio 'the art bunker'," Mr. Katsiff joked, "because he has more computers in his stronghold than most accountants have in their homes

Another section of the Wachovia space will be dedicated to animation sculptures.

"But all those computers keep Alan on the cutting edge of where art and technology merge," Mr. Katsiff explained, adding that Mr. Magee embraces more than most artists do the technology of Giclée prints, photography, computer graphics and animation.

The puppet animation evinces the influence of the Russian-Pole film maker, Ladislas Starovitch. The Quay brothers also receive a stylistic ode in toyland etudes of alienation.

"He is going to keep our perception of his passionate values alive through his incredible and up-to-date mastery of media," Mr. Katsiff said.

The artist also cites a deep respect for the past. As if historically important artists fulfill not a niche, but a calling, Mr. Magee can set forth his reasons why reconciling Realism and Modernism's appetite for innovation can be accomplished peaceably, with references to Tolstoy and Erasmus.

Mr. Magee said that one of his favorite essays, written by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1897, "What is Art?" requests a gentler merger. It was the aged Tolstoy's imploration for a departure from Modernism toward the creation of a more innovative art that would be inspired by an emotional "union among people."

While art critics such as George Bernard Shaw and Rainer Maria Rilke had panned Tolstoy for his condemnation of Modernism, Mr. Magee explained that the schism produced in art history by Post Modernism now begs for sutures. The movements, through which poster child Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979) called for the dismissal of writing histories identifying "leitmotifs" perhaps has had something to do with modern artists' reluctance to identify iconographic currents and influences running through their work.

"Art is about people," Mr. Magee insisted.

Mr. Magee comfortably admits that he has been influenced by the Spanish abstract painter Antoni Tapies, the Soviet film maker Andrei Tarkovsky and German Expressionists, all of whom may well be characterized through the convenient incorporation of "-ism's," but who have, "influenced me because they too represent the concentration on the whole human condition," Mr. Magee said, adding that by generalizing content, he was also bringing forward the natural beauty of his simpler subjects.

"The art of the future will thus be completely distinct, both in subject matter, and, in form, from what is now called art," Mr. Tolstoy had urged when he disparaged Modernism, insisting that art should be "open to everyone."

"I am in complete agreement with Tolstoy," Mr. Magee said.

Mr. Katsiff said that the humor of the pieces is what draws the viewer.

"The photomontage portraits in 'Doors and Magic', of a skeletal Franz Kafka standing before a black shadow land, shaped like an eerie cathedral, and Jan Svankmajer depicted as a distorted, dwarfed puppet, communicate social messages conveyed through universal qualities which Alan makes readily available to the eye," Mr. Katsiff said.

"Sometimes, I use humor to position disturbing currents in society." Mr. Magee explained, "I do this to evince the real, darker intentions that are often lurking behind appearances."

His exhaustive, erudite references included Desiderius Erasmus' essay, "In Praise of Folly." He said that he identifies with the Humanist's ironic and satirical mock-encomium deflating the pretensions of worldly dignity and learning.

"Erasmus assailed the Crusades and Martin Luther, condemning intellectual and physical wars over dogma, asking how does such ruthlessness make us better people?"

Mr. Tolstoy and Mr. Magee both have waxed Aristotelian. Tolstoy argued that an emotional "communication among people" depended upon the catharses which "true" art causes the viewer, relegating dogmatic interpretation to an "infection" that destroys rather than preserves culture.

"Tolstoy's message was that society had the potential instead for moving toward greater kindness and that art could become a spiritual avenue for people to become more humane," Mr. Magee exposited, adding that messages conveyed with humor produce the type of "kindness" which Mr. Katsiff earlier remarked, "Is readily available to the eye."

"Different from Zacherle's dissection of a cauliflower brain," added Mr. Magee, "television, for instance, today exhibits grossness in an unexpected way. Today, television has found a way to cleave away all traces of irony, double entendre and subtlety and is grotesque by being almost completely meaningless."

If, by relegating all art and social science to pretension, Post Modernism has brought on years of Reality Television, Mr. Tolstoy and Mr. Magee are probably right to bemoan cultural deficiencies which are now disguised as sources of enrichment.

"Seriousness must have a kind of foil," Mr. Magee explained, describing the humor pervading his work. "I paint realistically to present the ironic parables of human experience. The things we gravitate towards were perceived when we were children."

Although slides of Salvador Dali and Honore Daumier are shown in art classes, Mr. Magee noted, "They can't teach you wit in school." Moreover, he said, "like the chicken and the egg, I don't know which developed first in me, humor or Realism."

"This native son of Bucks County has always stood by his convictions during his life," said Mr. Katsiff beginning an amusing tale. "During the Vietnam War, Alan moved to Canada to protest the draft, even though his number never came up. He had too high a lottery number. He never had to go to Canada in the first place, but he did so because he believed that the war was wrong."

Mr. Magee was behaving in direct protest. Life does not always imitate art.

"But Alan's broadening his political status to that of a 'North American', was another way in which he pulled away from detail and focused on the bigger picture," Mr. Katsiff concluded.

The animated puppets of Wachovia's "Objects" section evoke the macabre effect which the Mutter Museum exercises upon the curious: the human body seen as plasticity. Anthropomorphic shapes and doll heads inhabiting bleak architectonic stages are morbidly cheerful. There is a toy human skeleton sculpture with the proportions of a toddler, entitled, "Anatomical Model," that seems oddly chipper. The viewer who sees the this section of the Wachovia gallery will feel as if she is watching an updated episode of Mr. Zacherle's "Shock Theatre" for adults.

Possibly the most breathtaking revue of Mr. Magee's Realism is the section, "Tromp L'oeil," named after the French term meaning, "to fool the eye." Mr. Katsiff described these paintings, as "works of Super Realism," among which he promised, there will be two portraits of Mrs. Magee.

The "Tromp L'oeil" works appear to be real objects that are attached to envelopes, postcards or packages. The viewer is fooled into thinking that the likenesses actually have been adhered to the paper surfaces, seeing tape and shadowed or bent edges that seem uncannily real.

"However, all the imagery has been painted," Mr. Katsiff said.

Two acrylic, "Tromp L'oeil" paintings exhibit these painterly faux realities, in a tribute to the age of Humanism. "The Annotated Erasmus," which was recently sold to a California collector, is a copy of the 1523 Hans Holbein portrait.

"I always wanted to do something after Holbein," Mr. Magee said.

"Holbein-Appended," contains a copy of Holbein's portrait, "Member of the Wedigh Family," and like the former, is situated among postcards and envelopes. The latter will be displayed at Mr. Magee's show at the Forum Gallery in New York City, which will open October 9th.

"In 'The Annotated Erasmus', I had the chance to add to the slyness of the Erasmus pamphlet by depicting a box of Crayons on the face of a postage stamp, at the left of the figure of Erasmus who is writing at his desk," said Mr. Magee, who said the box of Crayons heralds Erasmus' essay, "In Praise of Folly."

On October 29th, at 7pm, there will be a lecture and discussion given by Mr. Magee and author Jonathan Weiner in the museum's Ann and Herman Silverman Pavilion. 

"Jonathan and I have no agenda. We have decided to work off of what one another says," Mr. Magee foretold.

In reading The Beak of the Finch, for which Mr. Weiner won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, one cannot resist noticing the aesthetic affinity shared between the two men. Just as Mr. Magee looks for "surrogates" in ordinary objects, and "pulls away from detail," Mr. Weiner could write a manifesto for Mr. Magee's art.

"If we look at the billowing smoke of a volcano from close up, we see intense and rapid motion, enormous and dangerous turbulence. If we look at the eruption from far, far away (a safe distance that puts it almost to the horizon), the smoke seems to hang in the air almost motionless: we have to watch a long while to see any change at all. The evolution of life turns out to be rather like the eruption of a volcano. The closer you look, the more turbulent and dangerous the action; the farther your remove, the more the living world seems fixed and stable, hardly moving at all" (from The Beak of the Finch).

Mr. Katsiff mentioned the essay which Mr. Weiner contributed to the book, Alan Magee Paintings, Sculpture, Graphics. "Whenever an author like Jonathan writes about art, there is always much more depth and understanding in the paragraphs than is usually conveyed when an art critic or a historian writes about art."

"Jonathan and I met eight years ago through a mutual friend, Peter Pearson, the President of the Buckingham Friends School.," Mr. Magee said.

On November 11th at 1pm, Mr. Katsiff will give a lecture tour of Mr. Magee's work. Advance registration is required and is limited to the first 25 registrants. The exhibition, "Alan Magee: Three Decades of Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphics," will end on January 25th.

Additional information is available by calling the James A. Michener Museum at (215) 340-9800. 

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