My long and varied media career includes appearing in LIFE magazine. Time Inc. has been trying to revive the structure as a slideshow-oriented web 2.0 activity that pairs new images with deep dives into rich archives. We usually present old photos and new interviews with photographers or photo subjects. I couldn’t believe that the magazine still had so many Americans. Once Aretha Franklin called me in Detroit while she was making tortilla soup.
In 1953, LIFE ran a feature called “Mystic Painters of the Northwest,” a title that served as the inspiration for “Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,” an exhibition that just opened at the Seattle Art Museum that seeks to reinvent a particular reputation that has followed the region since then. The story of life anointed four Seattle artists—Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson—as the faces of a unique type of Modernism that embraced “the great forces of nature around them,” and “the influence of Eastern countries whose cultures permeated the communities along the US Pacific coast.” The Seattle Art Museum exhibition, with 150 paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures, builds on the ideas of the LIFE article by expanding its ideas.
Its first great idea was to bring in some Asian artists. Kamekichi Tokita’s The bridge (1931) would seem to indicate the extent to which LIFE’s summary of regional trends has become too simplistic. Tokita said that his principles were “derived from Cézanne and developed by the methods used by Sesshū,” and all of this seems to The bridge. It shows Seattle’s waterfront in the early stages of being strangled by the new trusses thrown up to carry the rail and road. It is a more formal test than the seascape. His calligraphic training is reflected in the metal and personifies the metal as a cruel neighbor.
The exhibition reverses the organization’s love of nature as it is close to the modern green movement, best seen in the work of Callahan and Graves, two of the four of LIFE. This is Callahan’s place Evening Mist in the Mountains (c. 1940) has a Twin Peaks feel because it pairs a postcard of the Northwest with a crime scene, in this case the unsanitary stumps of carved trees. In the cemetery The Milled Mountains (circa 1935-43) is even more didactic, and reminiscent of the infamous black-and-white show episode from Coming back-a desolate place of darkness and grey.
It is very difficult to be surreal, although the exhibition includes other artists in that movement, as well as Abstract Expressionism, including real examples of Salvador Dalí and Georgia O’Keeffe. Drift No. 2 (1936) by Malcolm Roberts is a good representation of this part of the exhibition because it feels like something Dalí would have painted had he visited the region. A weather vane pierces a pink, claw-footed bathtub on a fallen tree next to a torn jar in the sand. That sounds busy but it’s actually less weird than how Dalí would have done it, and it shows how cleanly this group of artists was lost in a different way and place.
“Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest” is on view at the Seattle Art Museum until August 2, 2026.
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