Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth
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.”
