My long and varied media career includes a stint at LIFE magazine. Time Inc. was It’s trying to revive the property as a slideshow-oriented Web 2.0 project that combines new images with a deep dive into the rich archives. We often feature old photographs alongside new interviews with photographers or photo subjects. I couldn’t believe the status the magazine still held for so many Americans. One time Aretha Franklin called me from Detroit while she was making tortilla soup.
In 1953, LIFE magazine published an article titled “Mysterious Painters of the Northwest,” a headline that served as inspiration for “Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,” a newly opened exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum that seeks to recast a certain reputation that has followed the region ever since. Life Story chose four Seattle artists—Mark Tobey, Maurice Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Jay Anderson—as the faces of a unique brand of modernism that embraced “the overwhelming forces of nature that surrounded them,” as well as “the influence of the East whose cultures seeped into the communities lining the Pacific Coast of the United States.” The Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition, which includes 150 paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures, builds on the ideas of the LIFE article by expanding its ideas.
Her first good idea was to actually bring in some Asian artists. Kamikichi Tokita Bridge (1931) seems to show how simplistic LIFE’s summary of area methods is. Tokita said that his goals were “found in Cézanne and developed through the methods used by Seishu,” and all of this is evident in Bridge. The photo shows Seattle’s waterfront in the early stages of being choked by new supports installed to hold the rails and roads. It’s more of a formal experience than a seascape. His calligraphy training is evident in ironwork and he personifies iron as an obnoxious neighbor.
The exhibition recasts the movement’s love of nature as akin to the contemporary green movement, evident in the works of Callaghan and Greaves, two of four in LIFE. Callahan Evening fog in the mountains (c. 1940) has a Twin Peaks feel because it combines a postcard Northwest landscape with a crime scene, in this case messy, hewn tree trunks. Graves Recorded mountains (c. 1935-1943) is more didactic, reminiscent of the infamous black-and-white exposition episode of Return– A ruined landscape of black and gray clay.
It’s too extreme to be surrealist, although the exhibition links other artists to that movement, to Abstract Expressionism, and links them to real examples of Salvador Dali and Georgia O’Keeffe. Drift #2 (1936) by Malcolm Roberts is a perfect representation of this part of the show because it looks like something Dali would have painted had he visited the area. A weather vane pierces a claw-footed pink bathtub through a fallen tree near a cracked jug in the sand. This sounds busy but it’s actually less complicated than the way Dali would have done it, and shows the clean way in which this group of artists was uniquely and locally cluttered.
“Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest“On display at the Seattle Art Museum until August 2, 2026.
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