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-The Northwest Mystics, it was a term that was coined in 1953
in an article in Life Magazine.
It featured four artists.
They were Mark Tobey...
Morris Graves...
Kenneth Callahan...
and Guy Anderson.
And it described these artists as deeply connected
to the Northwest landscape, as influenced by
Pacific cultures because of their proximity
to the Pacific Ocean.
And doing this far away from the centers of the art world,
that term mystics stuck.
And so it's been used to describe these four artists
and oftentimes Northwest modernism in general.
But the story as the show will tell you
is much, much more than that.
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Vanessa Helder, she was an artist from Seattle.
She was active in the ‘30s, and the work is called
"Coulee Dam Looking West."
And it's actually one of, I think, like 22 paintings in the
show that are about the Grand Coulee Dam.
Imagine what this must have been like
in real life to see a landscape just completely
change in front of your eyes.
This is, you know, she's on ground zero for this.
Also, so she's one of several women
artists in the exhibition.
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Women were a force in the art world in Seattle at this time.
These are amazing paintings, and what's really
extraordinary about them is they're all watercolors.
Her facility with watercolor is really amazing,
so she's the Northwest answer to precisionism
in American modernism.
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Kenneth Callahan's logging railroad construction,
this is unlike any of Callahan's works that I know.
This landscape is not the lush, alpine landscape
that we see in most of Callahan's landscapes.
It's barren, it's wasted, it's a foretelling
of things to come.
He was very, very environmentally conscious.
He was very concerned about the forest.
These were artists who really wanted to be alone with nature.
They sought inspiration in nature.
And as they saw that natural landscape
gradually get encroached upon by the lumber industry,
by overdevelopment, they became very anxious.
And they started to reflect this in their paintings.
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Paul Horiuchi's “Monolithic Impasse.”
Look at just how boldly abstract it is.
The heavy presence of black, the presence of
Horiuchi's hand.
He would take rice paper, dye it by hand, tear it up,
and then make these like wonderful abstract collages.
He really had a sense of design and color
and just how immersive it is.
He is one of several Japanese American artists
in the exhibition.
We talk a lot about how Northwest abstract
expressionists are influenced by Asian art.
Well, what people don't always remember is that there were
also Asian American artists active at this time, right
within this milieu, and Horiuchi was one of them.
What I find very interesting about these works is how they
hold their own with works by artists at the New York School.
Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, artists who are much more well
known in histories of abstract expressionism.
It shows Northwest modernism operating
in parallel and in tandem with with American
modernism more broadly, but also something that
is uniquely Northwest.
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