“Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest”

by Matthew Kangas

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle

Continues through August 2, 2026

Leo Kenney, “The Inception of Magic,” 1945, egg tempera on composite board, 36 1/8 x 24 1/8”. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Elizabeth Mann.

Following major surveys in 1978 and 2014, “Beyond Mysticism: the Modern Northwest” amplifies the scope of the Northwest School (including the Big Four of Guy Irving Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey), appending ancillary figures like Leo Kenney, William Cumming, George Tsutakawa and Paul Horiuchi. Omitted are parallel modernist art movements being practiced at the same time in the area, chiefly by University of Washington faculty modernists Ambrose Patterson, Walter F. Isaacs, Boyer Gonzales, Paul Bonifas, and Alexander Archipenko.

While drawing on the riches of the museum’s permanent collection, by now paramount in its holdings of Tobey, Callahan and Graves, curator Theresa Papanikolas has chosen not to reprise many of the masterpieces her predecessor Patricia Junker highlighted in 2014 in favor of another context: works by better-known American artists who influenced and coexisted with the Big Four and their cohort. Papanikolas has been able to bring some outstanding examples to Seattle to illustrate her viewpoint, emphasizing the connectedness of Northwest artists, rather than their legendary reclusiveness or spiritual isolation. As a result, textbook examples of Surrealists Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy hang near works by Tobey and Graves. They also illuminate contemporaries Margaret Tomkins, Kenney, James FitzGerald and especially Malcolm M. Roberts, whose stunning “View of Aurora Bridge” at night is a stand-out.

Malcolm M. Roberts, “Drift No. 2,” 1936, tempera on board 25 1/2 x 20 5/8”. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum.

In the section titled “The City and Industry,” works by leading Japanese American realists of the 1930s — Kenjiro Nomura, Kamekichi Tokita and Takuichi Fujii — are paired with spirited urban scenes by Reginald Marsh and grain silos by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove. Further juxtapositions in a section focusing on Callahan, Graves and Nomura present these artists through an “eco-critical lens.” Also included are the Native American Julius Twohy and African American sculptor James W. Washington, Jr. Papanikolas has also borrowed remarkably strong works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Alexander Hogue. The Seattleites are thus seen in a national context; ironically, the big names look more quaintly regional than the locals. Of special interest are twelve Grand Coulee Dam paintings by Z. Vanessa Helder. They are nostalgic to be sure, but Helder has been overlooked and is among the strongest of the WPA artists, so her inclusion is on balance a plus.

Z. Vanessa Helder, “Pool Below Kettle Falls,” 1939-41, watercolor, 19 x 22 3/4”. Courtesy of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane.

Notably, Tobey icons like “Forms Follow Man” (1941-43), “Festival” (1953) and “Electric Night” (1944) are absent because they have been exhibited in the earlier iterations. In addition, Papanikolas chose the works that bolster the points she examined at length in her catalogue essays. I object to the brightly enhanced reproduction of Tobey’s “Cirque d’Hiver” (1933), a pastel on paper which has darkened badly. What with all the acknowledgments in the catalogue to the museum’s conservation department, one wonders why this work was exhibited at all given its sad condition — and why its reproduction was doctored, a practice which borders on the unethical.

Kenneth Callahan, “Feller,” 1934, oil on canvas, 31 1/8 x 22”. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum.

Callahan’s and Graves’ works here serve to strengthen their overall reputations. They look better than ever here. I’d forgotten how great the latter’s large, dark, nearly all-black paintings look, particularly Graves’ “Burial of the New Law” and “Chalice Holding the Stimson Mill” (both 1936). They make his sappy wounded birds of the 1940s and dainty floral still lifes of the 1970s pale by comparison. Graves’ transition to mimicking Asian art is the most strained and unconvincing tactic associated with the Big Four.

As for Callahan, despite his constant exposure to Asian art while working as a curator, he, too, fits in better with the WPA, industrial America look. The mural commissions from Weyerhaeuser, “Loggers with Chokers” and “Weyerhaeuser Mill” (both 1944) are commanding presences (although the timber cutting patronage now registers as corporate art-washing). Callahan’s logger paintings, of which “Feller” (1934) is an example, are romantic, possibly homoerotic, reveries of robust workers with muscular posteriors and massive forearms, hacking away. The unexpectedly tender “The Accident” (1939) pairs two co-workers crouching and reclining. Only with “First Seed into the Last Harvest” (1943) and “The Seventh Day” (1952-53) did Callahan arrive at his mystical apotheosis.

Morris Graves, “Burial of the New Law,” 1936, oil on canvas, 43 x 38”. Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum.

The final section, “A Pacific Perspective? Northwest Abstract Expressionism” is the most contentious. It’s important to remember that Jackson Pollock (whose 1947 “Sea Change” should have been included) only developed his celebrated “all-over” compositions after being shown Tobey’s work by Clement Greenberg in a New York gallery. I also found the omission of Tobey’s tall Abstract Expressionist masterpiece, “Parnassus” (1963), puzzling. Instead, Horiuchi is paired with Franz Kline. William Ivey, surely the most significant local Abstract Expressionist, is also missing in action.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.