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♪ ♪

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♪ ♪

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-The Northwest Mystics, it was
a term that was coined in 1953

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in an article in Life Magazine.

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It featured four artists.

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They were Mark Tobey...

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Morris Graves...

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Kenneth Callahan...

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and Guy Anderson.

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And it described these
artists as deeply connected

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to the Northwest landscape,
as influenced by

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Pacific cultures because
of their proximity

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to the Pacific Ocean.

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And doing this far away from
the centers of the art world,

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that term mystics stuck.

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And so it's been used to
describe these four artists

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and oftentimes Northwest
modernism in general.

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But the story as the
show will tell you

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is much, much more than that.

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♪ ♪

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Vanessa Helder, she was
an artist from Seattle.

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She was active in the ‘30s,
and the work is called

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"Coulee Dam Looking West."

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And it's actually one of, I
think, like 22 paintings in the

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show that are about
the Grand Coulee Dam.

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Imagine what this
must have been like

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in real life to see a
landscape just completely

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change in front of your eyes.

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This is, you know, she's
on ground zero for this.

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Also, so she's one
of several women

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artists in the exhibition.

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♪ ♪

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Women were a force in the art
world in Seattle at this time.

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These are amazing paintings,
and what's really

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extraordinary about them is
they're all watercolors.

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Her facility with watercolor
is really amazing,

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so she's the Northwest
answer to precisionism

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in American modernism.

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♪♪

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Kenneth Callahan's logging
railroad construction,

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this is unlike any of
Callahan's works that I know.

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This landscape is not the
lush, alpine landscape

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that we see in most of
Callahan's landscapes.

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It's barren, it's wasted,
it's a foretelling

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of things to come.

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He was very, very
environmentally conscious.

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He was very concerned
about the forest.

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These were artists who really
wanted to be alone with nature.

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They sought
inspiration in nature.

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And as they saw that
natural landscape

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gradually get encroached
upon by the lumber industry,

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by overdevelopment, they
became very anxious.

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And they started to reflect
this in their paintings.

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♪ ♪

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Paul Horiuchi's
“Monolithic Impasse.”

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Look at just how
boldly abstract it is.

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The heavy presence of
black, the presence of

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Horiuchi's hand.

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He would take rice paper,
dye it by hand, tear it up,

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and then make these like
wonderful abstract collages.

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He really had a sense
of design and color

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and just how immersive it is.

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He is one of several
Japanese American artists

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in the exhibition.

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We talk a lot about
how Northwest abstract

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expressionists are
influenced by Asian art.

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Well, what people don't always
remember is that there were

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also Asian American artists
active at this time, right

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within this milieu, and
Horiuchi was one of them.

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What I find very interesting
about these works is how they

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hold their own with works by
artists at the New York School.

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Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb,
artists who are much more well

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known in histories of
abstract expressionism.

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It shows Northwest
modernism operating

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in parallel and in tandem
with with American

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modernism more broadly,
but also something that

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is uniquely Northwest.

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♪♪