IN MALCOLM M. ROBERTS’ 1941 PAINTING \u201cLunar Landscape,\u201d surrealism washes up on an imagined Pacific Northwestern shore.<\/p>\n
The title of the work implies that this dreamy scene takes place on the moon, but the mountains in the background look eerily like the Olympics during a stormy sunset. Pieces of driftwood are stuck upright into a shoreline, wrapped in rags, as purple-black clouds roil above. To Seattleites, the landscape may appear both oddly familiar and totally foreign, as if conjured from a dream that collided into a memory. Roberts \u2014 who lived in Seattle all his life \u2014 was deeply inspired by surrealists like Salvador Dal\u00ed, translating their taste for the uncanny onto Pacific Northwest vistas, beating David Lynch to the punch by a good half-century. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cLunar Landscape\u201d and over 150 other artworks are on view in Seattle Art Museum\u2019s latest show, \u201cBeyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,<\/em>\u201d which closes Aug. 2. Taking its name from the \u201cNorthwest Mystics\u201d \u2014 the infamous term bequeathed upon painters Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey in 1953 \u2014 the exhibition bucks the idea that artists working in midcentury Seattle were solely working in the \u201cmystic\u201d tradition as current scholarship typically holds.<\/p>\n Instead, \u201cBeyond Mysticism\u201d offers a glimpse at a wide breadth of abstract, social realist and surreal artwork made in Washington state by artists who worked in the same time period as the \u201cBig Four.\u201d In addition to showcasing work by the Northwest Mystics and their lesser-known contemporaries, the exhibition also mixes in pieces by celebrated artists who were working outside the Pacific Northwest at the time, including Georgia O\u2019Keefe, Max Ernst and Dal\u00ed, to further contextualize the ideas that were circulating in the Pacific Northwest. Most of the pieces in the show come from SAM\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n On the whole, \u201cBeyond Mysticism\u201d asserts that midcentury Seattle was not some mysterious, spiritually impenetrable outpost in the left corner of the contiguous United States, but a home to a diverse array of artists riffing on modernism in a way that revealed more about the Emerald City than it obscured.<\/p>\n Theresa Papanikolas, SAM\u2019s curator of American art, first got the idea for the exhibition while combing through the museum\u2019s collection ahead of the American galleries reinstallation<\/a> back in 2022. She found dozens of artworks by local artists from the mid-20th century that SAM hadn\u2019t shown much. The Big Four always got their shine, but considering their work alongside that of other artists from the same period revealed something deeper: a regional perspective rooted in nature and shaped by the social, economic and cultural conditions of the time.<\/p>\n \u201cAny kind of scholarship on modernism in the Pacific Northwest really focuses on four artists,\u201d Papanikolas says. \u201cThis was not aligned with what I was finding in the collection, which was all these other artists and artworks. A lot of it wasn\u2019t mystical or even abstract. I wanted to develop a project where I could tell the real story of what happened in the Pacific Northwest from the 1930s up through, and a little bit after, World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n For the uninitiated, the oft-told history of the Northwest Mystics goes something like this: On Sept. 28, 1953, Life magazine published an article titled \u201cMystic Painters of the Northwest,\u201d launching Anderson, Callahan, Graves and Tobey into the national sphere.<\/p>\n The article noted the \u201cBig Four\u201d of the Northwest School for the air of so-called mysticism of their work, a label that exoticized the inspiration they derived from the Pacific Northwest\u2019s Native and Asian communities as well as its natural world. Specifically, Anderson was known for his monumental, earth-toned works and nude figures; Callahan for his paintings of laborers and nature as well as his later dalliance in abstraction; Graves for his use of color, light and depictions of birds; and Tobey for his calligraphic abstract paintings.<\/p>\n Furthering the intrigue around these four men was the fact that all of them knew and greatly influenced one another. (Callahan and his first wife, Margaret, routinely hosted salons at their house; Graves and Anderson were even lovers at one point). Their tangled web of connections only fueled the \u201cmystic\u201d narrative.<\/p>\n \u201c[The Life article] made them seem super wacky and mystical and interested in life forces beyond what was visible,\u201d Papanikolas says. \u201cThere’s a lot of great scholarship on this period, but it always tends to take at face value that these artists were mystical in the sense that they’re pulling from some unseen force within the Pacific Northwest.\u201d<\/p>\n Because the exhibition\u2019s thesis is so wide, its berth of included artists feels like who\u2019s who of the midcentury in Seattle, regardless of medium.<\/p>\n There is sculptor James W. Washington Jr.\u2019s egg-like granite carving of a noble woodchuck; photos from smoky jazz clubs along Jackson Street taken by prolific photographer Al Smith; the dusty, industrial desertscapes depicting the construction of Grand Coulee Dam and serene blue green pools of Kettle Falls by Eastern Washington\u2019s Z. Vanessa Helder; painter and sculptor George Tsutakawa\u2019s impeccably balanced abstract wooden sculptures.<\/p>\n In some pieces, bits of Seattle are distinctly recognizable \u2014 like in the impressive 1942 watercolor of the crowded ship docks on Lake Union by Fay Chong, who studied art alongside Graves and Tsutakawa at Seattle\u2019s Broadway High School. Anyone who has huffed up Yesler Avenue from Pioneer Square will immediately clock the setting of Kenjiro Nomura\u2019s \u201cStreet\u201d which renders the avenue in a serene wash of blues and grays. (\u201cBeyond Mysticism\u201d includes an interactive game where visitors guess the locations depicted in each painting.)<\/p>\n In other works, painters like Callahan and William Cumming depicted the factory and lumber laborers who fueled the region\u2019s economy. Through their work, these artists fastidiously mapped the city and people who built it, reflecting the ways the various industries impacted the region.<\/p>\n Collectively, Pacific Northwestern artists had their own unique take on abstraction, one deeply informed by Asian and northwest Native art traditions. Tobey, in particular, was noted for his study of Asian and Arabic calligraphy, which inspired his \u201cwhite writing\u201d technique that featured an ecstatic network of white lines over a Pollock-esque abstract painting. Anderson almost wholesale ripped Salish motifs in works like “Primitive Forms II,\u201d which feature vaguely recognizable renderings of eyes.<\/p>\n The works made by the Big Four stand in contrast to artworks made by Asian, Asian American and Native artists of the time who blended their own cultural heritage with their understanding of modernist art. During their lifetimes, their unique perspectives as minority artists were often sidelined as traditional examples of Asian or Native art and overlooked by the mainstream rather than being taken seriously in their own right.<\/p>\n Take, for instance Julius \u201cLand Elk\u201d Twohy\u2019s lithograph \u201cTom Toms and Drum\u201d (1939). Twohy, a member of the Ute tribe,<\/span> transformed patterned drum skins into several ornamented Kandinsky-like orbs that thrum with their own rhythm and energy. Paul Horiuchi, a Japanese immigrant to Seattle, riffed on abstract expressionist forms by collaging hand-dyed rice paper into angular forms, inspired by the old, peeling layers of paper advertisements posted on buildings around the Chinatown International District.<\/p>\n One of the most powerful moments in the show is in a gallery where Horiuchi\u2019s \u201cMonolithic Impasse\u201d (1964) hangs across from works by two of the biggest artists in abstract expressionism \u2014 \u201cCross Section\u201d (1956) by Franz Kline and \u201cCrimson Spinning #2\u201d (1959) by Adolph Gottlieb. Though Horiuchi worked in collage rather than oil paint like Kline and Gottlieb, their forms are similar \u2014 angular, dark, and energetic. Together, they ask the viewer to consider who gets recognized in conversations about modernism and abstract expressionism.<\/p>\n In overlapping all these perspectives and experiences, \u201cBeyond Mysticism\u201d brings a depth to the understanding of the artistic goings on of Seattle during a period where the city was rapidly growing and industrializing. The scene was always more than four painters simply divining work from within themselves, producing paintings that were the result of otherworldly forces. Rather, they were artists painting within a community of artists who were, in turn, inspired by their own histories, heritages and environments that then broke through in their art.<\/p>\nGetting beyond the Big Four<\/h2>\n
Rooted in time and place<\/h2>\n
Ongoing influence<\/h2>\n