Anna Deveare Smith also performed "War Painting," based on an interview with artist Bryce Marden. Narrated from the artist's point of view, this is a conversation with a conservator who, when asked his favorite painter, talks about Mark Rothko and then Pablo Picasso.

"If I could just paint like Picasso for two minutes."

And I said, "Well why is that?"

"Because of the confidence." "I mean, he'll even erase, but that's not because he made a mistake, "It's because he's changing his mind."

I said, it's a confidence about what?"

"It's a confidence that he can do any damn thing he wants!"

Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he couldn't do an abstract painting. He was Spanish. He was like Bastin he had to deal with what he saw. He was a realist. He painted the nude endlessly and the human condition endlessly in a very depictorial, literary way. I mean, I don't want to disparage but uh, he's just not one of my favorites.

Well I kept thinking Cezanne and taking painting to this point and Cezanne is talking about, you know, like capturing this vision, this expression, and he's talking about these really really very way out-there ideas and this really way out-there guy.

And then Picasso comes in and he's really talented and he makes this bunch of fucking mundane paintings, so to me it's Cezanne, and then Pollock comes out of Cezanne. Sure, confidence is part of it, but part of it is about the struggle. Well, I think part of it is the doubt and the doubt is a reflection that it might vex the color and the color is kind of on ease and I assume as part of my expressiveness. My work with color is a little off. There's no confidence. Like Picasso never doubted that he couldn't draw as well as he wanted to draw. My drawing is more about, you know, trying to - and it's hard to separate the romance of Pollock. There's an intensity about it that's so alluring. I find it comparable to Cezanne. Cezanne had these ideas he was really struggling with, whereas somebody like Picasso. I saw this Gerhard Richter quote in a Christie's catalog about how abstract painting is dealing with things that we don't know. It used to be that you dealt with things you didn't know, you don't see, and the other way is that abstract painting is this other way of dealing with things that you just don't know about, things you can't see, things you can't get. It approaches feeling in this way: great doubt, doubt, questioning. It's not question-and-answer, whereas in Picasso, a lot of stuff to me is - then again, I went to see "Guernica," went to this Thyssen show in Madrid a couple weeks ago. I said, "Well, while I'm here I've got to go see ‘Guernica.'" It is amazing. It's a really amazing painting. It's like, "Oh, we haven't done our war painting." That was the last great war painting. How come we haven't done our war painting? Somehow it's being done. Somebody'll do it. Well, I think it takes a new understanding about how horrible it all is. Now we're living in this time where they really did just put one over on us. It's like a solution. They think it's a solution. I think it's coming up. It's gotten so horrible that there's bound to be some insight into how horrible it all is. There could be nuclear war, and the whole thing could just end. People - I don't think they get that. That's what Picasso was reacting to, that sort of cold-blooded, murderous - the ability to be that way. He saw it and he reacted to it in this unbelievable painting, and the thing is, when you see - you want to talk politics? When they were installing that thing, and they were in the Reina Sofia, they had to put it behind bullet-proof glass because of the terrorist Basque terrorism. They thought it was going to be attacked. Now it's there, and they don't have the bullet-proof glass. It looks very much like a painting. It's really powerful. Very direct. You can feel the hand going through with a kind of passion. It's like this thing. It's like the caves. You see some bull on the wall of a cave, and it's just like this kind of awe. It's like the human is just in awe of this thing, and because of this awe, they have to make, they have to express. We were brought up with it. It was in the Museum of Modern Art, we saw it all the time, and then suddenly it was gone. It lost some meaning, and the meaning's back. When I saw it just a couple weeks ago, it seems to me the meaning's back, and it brings up that question: Why haven't we made our war painting?