MacNeil Comments on MacDowell Artist Colony

Read the Full Transcript

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Hello this is Jeffrey Brown. This year the MacDowell Colony is celebrating 100 years of offering time and space in the woods of Southern New Hampshire to artists, writers, composers and many others. There's a lot of cultural history here. Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copeland, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Michael Chabon, and several thousand others worked at MacDowell. We visited recently and had a chance to talk to some of the current residents or colonists as they're called; each there for one to two months of time away from the pressures and demands of real life. We also talked to a man very familiar to NewsHour viewers, our long time co-anchor Robert MacNeil, who has served as the chairman of MacDowell now for the last 15 years. In the first Online NewsHour Insider Forum, Robin joins me now to answer some of the questions we received after our story aired. Robin, welcome.

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  Thanks, Jeff.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Well we got a lot of mail from people and I'm going to try to pick out some of the big themes in some of the specific areas. They were of course about MacDowell, about the arts generally and about you. So one of them and maybe a good place to start is how you became involved with MacDowell and why. I got a question here from Frank Fahey of Claremont, New Hampshire. "Mr. MacNeil, how did you become involved with the MacDowell Colony?"

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  Well, it was very simple. In 1993, two members of the board came and asked me if I would be the chairman. And I knew about MacDowell, well I knew a little about it and thought it was a really interesting place and in about three minutes I said yes.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  It only took three minutes.

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  Yes.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Well, what did you know and what was the attraction?

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  Well, I'm very interested in the arts. I set out in my own life to be a creative writer after getting over a brief flirtation with being an actor, thank God.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Which are you thanking God for? The brief part?

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  No, the brevity of my ambition to be an actor. The stage was saved a great deal and so was I. Anyway, and I wanted to be a creative writer. I set out to be a playwright and I became a journalist because the plays weren't selling and I had a family growing and I needed to make a living. And late in life, like Jim Lehrer, I've come back to that ambition and am writing now and have published a number of books including several novels. In fact, I'm working on another this summer. And so deep in my heart is great respect for artists of all kinds because I know how hard their life is, not under the financial strictures, cause most of them are very poor. Most of them earn so little money doing whatever they do as side jobs that they pay no income tax. But also just how hard the work they do is. When you said, "away from real life," real life for a professional artist is, their art. I mean it's the hours spent at a typewriter or computer or at a easel or for a sculpture a piece of stone, whatever it is and it is very hard work. And I know that and respect it. Two of my four children, three of my four children, are artists of one kind or another and so I thought this was a good thing for me to do.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  You write of course about the notion of real life artists, but of course when I asked people there about their life back at home, they talked about having to have jobs, about teaching, about all the things that they need to do to make that living.

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  Yeah, that's right. And the MacDowells, Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian, in 1907, knew that about many artist friends and that was the inspiration to give them a bit of relief from those financial pressures and to let them have a quiet, comforting and welcoming place to work where the work that artists do is taken seriously.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Well, let's go into that history a bit more because there were a number of questions along those lines. I have one from Andrew Bell of San Diego, "What is the history of artists colonies and how does MacDowell fit into it?"

• ROBERT MACNEIL:

  Well, MacDowell was the prototype. It was the first. Another big one, Yaddo, came along in the 1920s, but MacDowell was the model which has since been copied all over this country and in many parts of the world. And it was the inspiration of the great American composer Edward MacDowell and his wife who had been his piano student in Europe, and they fell in love and they came back and then they knew a lot of artists. Edward MacDowell was the one who founded the School of Music at Columbia and in his day, he was the great serious American composer who believed that American artists at a time when there was still huge deference being paid to anything produced in Europe, that Americans potentially could do anything in the arts. A vision which of course has been borne up throughout the 20th century. So they had the idea of inviting some of their hard up artist friends to come up and spend time with them and gradually that grew into over the decades, into what we have now 32 studios separated in the woods, the 450 acres of woods that is the property outside Peterborough, New Hampshire, which the MacDowells bought and gradually incorporated as an artist colony. And that's the history.