The question is hard to get your head around: If Charles Krafft is a Holocaust denier, what does that say about his revered artwork? What exactly does he believe happened, and didn't happen, during the Holocaust? How should collectors and curators—or anyone who sees his work— reassess his art in light of what he's been saying lately?
Krafft, an elder of Seattle art, is a provocateur. He makes ceramics out of human cremains, perfume bottles with swastika stoppers, wedding cakes frosted with Third Reich insignias. Up-and-coming artists continue to admire him. Leading curators include him in group shows from Bumbershoot to City Arts Fest. His work is in the permanent collections of Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, and the Museum of Northwest Art, and it's been written about in the New Yorker, Harper's, Artforum, Juxtapoz. It's also appeared on the cover of The Stranger.
In 2009, I included his daintily painted ceramic AK 47 on a list of the 25 best works of art ever made in Seattle, and called him "the Northwest's best iconoclast." AK 47 is part of Krafft's Disasterware series, injecting the homey crafts of European ceramic painting with violence and catastrophic events. At the time of its creation, pretty much everyone thought Krafft was being ironic—poking holes in the fascist and totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. He said as much in an interview in Salon in 2002. "For some reason, art has to be this earnest, serious, even Freudian, exploration," he told Salon. "But it doesn't necessarily have to be that at all. Art that's funny seems to get dismissed just because it is funny. But I've always had a knack and a penchant for going toward humorous irony."
Now, a decade later, some of Krafft's more than 2,000 Facebook friends would be hard-pressed to detect humor in his increasingly sinister posts. On January 14, for instance, Krafft posted, "Why amongst the monuments glorifying the history of this nation in Wash DC is there a museum of horrors dedicated to people who never lived, fought, or died here? The USHMM [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] was erected before there was ever a monument to the 465,000 Americans who died in WWII. And no one did enough to save the Jews of Europe?"
When I wrote to Krafft back in May, letting him know that a reader had asked whether he was a Holocaust denier, I added, "I suppose you don't have to answer that, but I guess I'd like to know." This wasn't the first time I'd heard the rumor, but I found it impossible to imagine that the swastikas on Krafft's work might reflect genuine spite toward Jews—i.e., that there might not be so much difference between Krafft's swastikas and Hitler's. After all, that could mean this self-taught, former Skagit Valley hippie artist was using the guise of art and irony to smuggle far-right symbols into museums, galleries, collectors' homes, and upscale decor shops like Far4 on First Avenue.
... You can find Krafft narrating his philosophy in his own voice just by doing a little googling. On July 28, 2012, he participated (not for the first time) in a podcast produced by the white nationalist website The White Network, whose tagline is "Whites Talking to Whites About White Interests." According to The White Network's "about" page, "We recognize that different races and ethnic groups cannot live together in peace on the same soil, that Whites cannot and should not tolerate being governed by non-Whites." The description goes on to say: "Jews are not White. They are obsessed with their own group's best interests, not ours. Our network is and will always remain by, for, and about the best interests of Whites, and only Whites. We are uncompromising on this point. We do not hesitate to identify and criticize Jews and will not allow them to hide amongst us."
On the podcast, Krafft says, "I believe the Holocaust is a myth," and that the myth is "being used to promote multiculturalism and globalism." He says he believes the Christian story of the sacrifice of one man (Jesus) is being trumped "by this new secular religion of the sacrifice of six million Jews. And the museums, memorials, monuments, study centers, Holocaust chairs at the universities—it's all part of the promotion of a new kind of, like I said, civil religion maybe... We're the heretics in a new religion that's being promoted and built up and being embraced by governments throughout the United States and Europe."
... To clarify his views, last week I asked Krafft over e-mail, "Do you believe Hitler's regime systematically murdered millions of Jews?"
Krafft wrote back, "I don't doubt that Hitler's regime killed a lot of Jews in WWII, but I don't believe they were ever frog marched into homicidal gas chambers and dispatched. I think between 700,000–1.2 million Jews died of disease, starvation, overwork, reprisals for partisan attacks, allied bombing, and natural causes during the war."
That was the entire e-mail. I followed up: "The number I've always read is 6 million Jews killed. I just want to clarify that it's your belief that 700,000 to 1.2 million Jews died total."
Krafft did not answer the question. He only sent a link to a story about exaggerations in the original numbers of Jews reported killed at Auschwitz. That story, called "New 'Official' Changes in the Auschwitz Story," appears on a website called Institute for Historical Review.
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On Facebook, Krafft has posted links to claims that death-camp photography was doctored and that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum fraudulently displayed a gas chamber door. "Holocaust studies is an academic echo chamber," he has written.
Krafft's Facebook posts got the attention of Tim Detweiler, who showed Krafft's work several times during his tenure as director of the Museum of Northwest Art. He's not sure how to feel. "If you were a Nazi sympathizer and selling Hitler paraphernalia by the side of the road, you'd be killed," Detweiler said. "But he's selling it at the highest-priced stores and at galleries all over the country... It would be like if Kara Walker came out after doing all these years of pickaninnies"—Walker is an African American artist who makes cartoonish silhouettes of horrible scenes from slavery—"and said, 'Oh, through my research, I've found that the slave trade was not as bad as we thought—the numbers were exaggerated and the slaves had more choice than we thought.' What would you think of her work then? I mean, I don't know. My head's spinning, to be honest."
According to old friends of Krafft's interviewed for this story, Krafft has laughed in private at the liberal-leaning art establishment he's fooled with his art. In response to that accusation, Krafft said, "I would ask the person who told you they have seen me laugh about 'fooling' curators to be more specific and tell you which curators they saw me laughing at." More than one person tells the story of Krafft privately laughing at curator Timothy Burgard, who is in charge of American art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF).
In 2003, Krafft made a ceramic teapot in the shape of a bust of Hitler, with eerie holes for eyes. A Jewish collector named Sandy Besser, now dead, bought the Hitler teapot and added it to his overtly politically themed collection, which he later donated to FAMSF, where it went on display in 2007. Burgard wrote about it in a catalog as explicitly and clearly antifascist. "These blind-looking eyes also evoke associations with... the world turning a blind eye to the horrors of the Holocaust."
... As an experiment, Burgard showed the Hitler teapot to a colleague who had never seen it before and the colleague agreed with Burgard's original interpretation. What does it mean that when Krafft made this portrait of a demonized Hitler, he was actually beginning to spread the word that the demonization of Hitler has been greatly exaggerated?
Another question: Will the museum get rid of the Krafft? That's unlikely, Burgard said, explaining that he values the perspectives brought by artworks, maybe even more so when they're reminders of attitudes we'd forget at our own risk of repeating them. The label on the wall will probably have to change. Burgard said that if Besser—the original collector of the Hitler teapot—had thought the sculpture rehabilitated Hitler's regime, he'd probably have smashed it.
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Later, I asked Krafft what he thought of Tim Detweiler's comparison to [an African-American woman artist who makes art primarily about slavery]. "The difference between me and Kara Williams [sic] is that she gets to play the race card and I don't because I'm an unregenerate white heterosexual male," Krafft protested. "Has Kara Williams [sic] ever not cut a race based silhouette? Does she even know that the first person on record as a slave owner in America, Anthony Johnson, was black?!"
... Krafft's friends say it's exhausting to argue with him because of his ability to cite everything he's read. He's been a poet and an artist since the 1960s and a proven rabble-rouser since high school, when he was expelled by a headmaster who said, according to a story Krafft delights in repeating, "Charlie puts people on edge and keeps them there." But lately he's taken his experiment in putting people on edge further than ever before, and his friends, other artists, and even people who sell his work are hitting their limits.
... Another old friend, Tacoma writer Peggy Andersen, said she had to stop socializing with Krafft. "I told him, 'When I hang out with you, I feel like I'm endorsing something.'... His main thing is that the Holocaust is an exaggeration. I say, if they only killed 10,000 people because they were Jewish, it would still be a holocaust, jackass." As Andersen and I ended our interview, she said, "Be sure to say I love Charlie."
... Krafft is not a simple case, and nobody who knows him seems to be enjoying this moment. His personal kindness and generosity to friends and other artists is well-known. He's a Buddhist; I had to interview him by e-mail for this story because he's on a long pilgrimage in India.
Maybe what's hardest to accept is that a man so totally, radically, fist-pumpingly opposed to ideology—a guy you wanted to root for at the end of a bloody, painfully ideological century—himself seems to have succumbed to an ideology. ...
