My long and varied media career includes a stint at LIFE magazine. Time Inc. had been trying to revive the property as a Web 2.0 slideshow-oriented venture that combined new photos with deep dives into rich archives. We would often present old photos alongside new interviews with the photographers or subjects of the photos. I couldn’t believe the stature the magazine still held for many Americans. Once Aretha Franklin called me from Detroit while she was making tortilla soup.
In 1953, LIFE published a feature called “Mystical Painters of the Northwest,” the title serving as the inspiration for “Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,” a newly opened exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum that seeks to reframe a certain reputation that has dogged the region ever since. The LIFE story anointed four Seattle artists—Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan AND Guy Anderson– as the faces of a unique brand of Modernism that embraced “the overwhelming forces of nature around them” as well as “the influence of the Orient, whose cultures have permeated the communities along the Pacific coast of the USA”. The Seattle Art Museum’s show, which features 150 paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures, builds on the ideas of the LIFE article by expanding on its ideas.
The first good idea was to bring in some artists who are actually Asian. Kamekichi TokitaS ‘ Bridge (1931) seems to demonstrate the extent to which LIFE’s summary of the styles of the region was an oversimplification. Tokita said that his goals “were found in Cézanne and developed through the methods used by Sesshū,” and all of this is evident in Bridge. It shows Seattle’s waterfront in the early stages of being choked by new trucks thrown in to carry rail and road. It is a formal experiment more than a seascape. His calligraphic training is evident in his ironwork and personifies iron as an obnoxious neighbor.
The exhibit revisits the movement’s love of nature as closest to the contemporary green movement, best seen in the work of Callahan and Graves, two of LIFE’s four. of Callahan Evening fog in the mountains (c. 1940) has the feel of Twin Peaks because it combines a postcard Northwest landscape with a crime scene, in this case the jumbled trunks of felled trees. of the Tombs Recorded mountains (c. 1935-43) is even more didactic and reminiscent of the infamous black and white episode of the show from Return– a ruined landscape with black and gray flow.
It’s too harsh to be Surrealist, although the exhibition links other artists to that movement and to Abstract Expressionism, pairing them with real-life examples from Salvador Dalí and Georgia O’Keeffe. Drift no. 2 (1936) by Malcolm Roberts it’s a perfect representation of this part of the show because it feels like something Dalí would have painted had he visited the region. A weather vane pierces a pink clawfoot tub through a fallen tree next to a cracked pitcher in the sand. This sounds busy, but it’s actually less complicated than the way Dalí would have done it, and it shows the pure way in which this group of artists was uniquely and locally crazy.
“Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest” is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through August 2, 2026.
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