Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest at Seattle Art Museum
Back when I was a Young Artist, I had a job as a ceramics tech at a school, which meant that I made all of the clay, prepped the studio and fired the kilns. I was to absorb knowledge from the professors as I circled about them. For the final crit on wheel-thrown work of the ceramics class, the prof told the students to bring forth ten of their best cups. These were still unfired clay, quite delicate in many cases. There was much discussion and posturing, and eventually each student had one cup chosen as The Best. The prof brought over a large, water-filled bucket and deposited the remaining nine of the students’ cups within, back to mud. There were audible gasps, among other phrases, heard as this action progressed. “Remember,” said the prof, “art is process and not all art is so precious that it should remain.” In other words, be your own best editor. That lesson stayed with me.
As a connoisseur of all Northwest things grey and brown, I was breathless with anticipation to see Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest at the Seattle Art Museum. When I completed the trek through the show, I was out of breath and dizzy. The exhibition is roughly contained within four themes – Industrialization, Ecocriticism, Surrealism and AbEx, but the organization is tenuous. It seems that more concise editing could have resulted in more coherent connections between these ideas, each of which could have been a standalone show. And here is where I began to lose my way.
The first group of artworks is an exemplary selection of Modernist artists painting the effect of industrialization and urbanization upon the land. The strong regional representational paintings of the 1930s are represented by the Japanese American artists, Kenjiro Nomura, Takuichi Fujii and Kamekichi Tokita, with his so good, Billboard, 1932, with very painterly images of the streets and buildings of Seattle’s Nihonmachi, or Japan Town. The noted Russian American muralist Jacob Elshin depicts the enormous Fisher Flour Mills storage buildings alongside Spoiled Carnival, 1946, by Yvonne Twining Humber. Here she shows not the sunny Puyallup Fair but a dreary scene that reflects the incarceration of Japanese Americans at the fairgrounds during World War II. Fujii’s Rock Island Dam, 1935, is a prelude to The Vanessa Helder Room, a space created for a masterclass in watercolor and the built environment. I have long been a fan of this work, painted between 1939 and 1941, but it is rarely seen this side of the mountains. She crisply captures the color and light of the Grand Coulee Dam during its construction. I question, however, the observation in the text panel that these paintings show “the intrusion of the dam’s infrastructure into the landscape” as being a conscious criticism by the artist.
The next section of the exhibition is essentially Social Realism: strong men doing heroic work in the rugged Northwest. The sometimes-grim text panels, such as the one for Logging Railroad Construction, 1937, by Kenneth Callhan, suggest that the artists were critically documenting the workers as they “annihilated” the ancient forests in the “destructive drama” of falling timber. I think that calling this Eco-Criticism may be a modern-day distortion of the era. In many of Callahan’s paintings of the loggers and miners (and the tools and methods of extraction), he romanticized the logging process and the men more than anything, such as in the large Weyerhaeuser Mill murals, also in this exhibition. Yes, we can, in hindsight, know that this was a period of over harvesting, but look to paintings like Morris Graves’ Mountain Forest Seedlings, 1957, not in this show, or his great bird painting, Each Time You Carry Me This Way, 1953, to find that regrowth was also on their minds. And who can deny the joy found in Mark Tobey’s Dancing Miners, c. 1922-27?
I was thrilled to see the many small studies Tobey made at Pike Place Market. I love the vitality and spontaneity in these works. I guess I was supposed to compare and contrast them with the delightful Albert Smith’s black and white photos of Seattle’s early jazz scene, located in the same passageway, but that seemed like a stretch.
From here, I wandered farther down the Dark Hall past the strangely illuminated Freight Elevator, past some very nice larger-scale Graves still lifes until, at the end, I encountered an ungainly trio of paintings by Nomura, Callahan and Georgia O’Keeffe. What is going on here? Red barns, a cluster of mailboxes and a cloud composition? Is it about the clouds in each? The Nomura and Callahan were made in the Northwest about the same time, but the O’Keeffe was most likely painted in upstate New York ten years prior. This discrete group could have been the central thesis for a whole other show.
My head was spinning as I moved into the next room, but was I on the right path? The navigation was unclear. I bounced from the very odd nude in the landscape, Erosion No. 2 – Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936, by Alexander Hogue, which was about the Dust Bowl in the Midwest but strangely sexual, to a New Mexico snag, Dead Tree Bear Lake Taos, 1929, by O’Keeffe, to a robust Maine logjam by Marsden Hartley, past a few James Washington Jr. rock carvings to the monumental Callahan Weyerhaeuser logging murals. And then there was the swirling illuminated video projection proscenium portal into the next room of Surrealism. Who made this lightwork? Or is it décor?
The delirious images of the budding Surrealists crowded together in these rooms were difficult to unpack. There is but a tenuous thread of the surreal holding these works together. I do agree that Surrealism madness affected some of the region’s artists, but I find it hard to call them such. I might categorize them during this time period as Surrealism Adjacent, as they were trying it on for size. Margaret Tomkins, Louis Bunce and Graves wandered through it and out the other side, but Leo Kenney was more deeply affected. I am sure that the mediocre Dali paintings are crowd favorites, but they are not his best. The inclusion of George Tsutakawa within the Surrealists, notably The Ascent, 1950, was a nicely placed hint to his better-known sculptural work. The shapes in the early paintings filtered through traditional Japanese forms are evidenced in the striking Obos pieces.
Another thread through the show that I would like to see unraveled a bit more is the influence of the Asian cultures, from the early Nihonmachi landscapes through Tobey and Tsutakawa and the collages of Paul Horiuchi. Noting that the famous 1961 LIFE Magazine article did surface treatment to it, with “perceived alignment with Asian and Northwest Coast Native cultures,” let’s see that teased out again. And bring Zoe Dusanne back into the mix.
I was quite moved by the powerful, large multi-panel pieces by Horiuchi, especially Abstract Screen, 1961, and how his collages make the inclusion of the Gottlieb and Kline paintings both secondary and unnecessary.
I would be remiss not to note that the last section on your way out of the gallery is devoted to Indigenous art and artists. The derivative Tobey Esquimaux Idiom, 1946, pales in comparison to the elegant lithographs from 1936-37 by Julius “Land Elk” Twohy. I am certain that SAM has other artworks by local Indigenous artists that could have been included as well, as the argillite totems are minor.
The writer Sam Shepard once said, reflecting upon history, “The past doesn’t come as a whole. It always comes in parts. In fact, it comes apart. It presents itself as though it was experienced in fragments.” This is an exhibition of many disparate parts, bound by a common region in a time of great change. I found it confusing and unnecessarily long, with odd interjections of national and international artists for context.
For the reader’s reference, other notable exhibitions have examined this small wedge of art numerous times. Most recently, we have seen Side By Side: Nihonmachi Scenes by Tokita, Nomura, and Fujii, at Wing Luke Museum, Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Northwest at Tacoma Art Museum; Northwest Traditions at SAM, What It Meant to be Modern: Seattle Art at Mid-Century, at the Henry and Northwest Mythologies: The Interactions of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson, also at TAM. Each of these shows looked at more finite pieces of the art of the Northwest. I am not sure what Beyond Mysticism adds to the canon. I wanted less; I wanted more. More about Oregonians C. S. Price, Charles Heaney, Arthur and Albert C. Runquist, less about the New York connections.
For me, it just makes it less clear, more brown and grey, and more muddy.
Milton Freewater
Milton Freewater is an arts writer living in Seattle, Washington.
