One on Either Side - Adolf Wagner Stone, XX cm, 1988 624 x 400 pixels, 59 Kb 951 x 610 pixels, 117 Kb 1201 x 770 pixels, 181 Kb

That the Imperial War Museum once more takes part in the living dialogue of British art is largely the result of the efforts of Angela Weight. She has made the institution confront the art of our time, and has made the contemporary artist focus (as predecessors in the world wars had done) upon the war of our time. I was naturally intrigued to be invited to make a work on such a theme.

When we met in 1986, Angela Weight suggested that I might like to do something about 'our boys' in Germany, specifically West Berlin. I felt that I had somehow covered this ground, for myself at least, in the paintings I had done about the Berlin Wall: I asked her if there was anything else, anywhere else. There did not seem to be. However, just as we appeared to have reached a dead end, Angela remembered that the museum had no piece of art relating to the campaign in Crete. I leaped at this Idea, since Crete especially interested me as both the (legendary) birthplace of western writing and of myths which play an important part in Dante's Inferno. I had also never been there.  > >