Northwest School (art)

Carl Morris Agriculture, c.1941, mural, Eugene, Oregon post office

The Northwest School was an art movement based in small-town Skagit County, Washington, and was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.

The big four

The movement's early participants, and its defining artists, have become known as "the big four": Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Their work became recognized nationally when LIFE magazine published a 1953 feature article. It was the first such broad recognition of artists from this corner of the world beyond traditional northwest Native American art forms that had been long recognized previously as "northwest art."

They combined the natural elements of the Puget Sound area with traditional Asian aesthetics to create a novel and distinct regional style, particularly in painting and sculpture with some drawing, printmaking and photography. Tobey, Callahan, Graves and Anderson were all were greatly influenced by the atmosphere of thePacific Northwest environment. Seattle was a common locale they all shared at points in their lives, but the influence of the natural setting of Western Washington, especially the Skagit Valley, became a unifying aspect of their art.

The media most commonly used by the painters in this main group of artists were tempera, oil and gouache on canvas. Paper and wood were also deployed with similar mediums. Morris Graves worked in three dimensional forms, using steel and glass and stone, among other materials....Guy Anderson made works from bronze and also had "collages" around his home of found objects from beach walks and deteriorating metal he saw beauty in....forms that informed his painting.

Style

The style of the Northwest School is characterized by the use of symbols of the nature of Western Washington, as well as the diffuse lighting characteristic of the Skagit Valley area. The lighting and choice of earthy tonal ranges in the color is one of the most important qualities of Northwest art. Even Tobey, whose artwork did not include as much natural Northwest subject matter, is easily identified as Northwest style because of the soft pastel-like colors that he used, and the dark mist-like chroma of the lighting with a lack of stark shadows.

The Northwest artists were labeled as mystics, although this label was forcefully denied by some of them. They actually denied being a "school" of art, but they did know one another-Guy Anderson and Morris Graves spent time together travelling and painting-and they have been grouped this way because all of their styles were influenced by similar things and therefore their artwork has major unifying themes.

In addition to the local natural setting and the Asian influence, the Northwest School also shows some influence from surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism. The cubist influence is shown to some extent in Kenneth Callahan’s Prism and the Dark Globe (1946) and Tobey’s Western Town (1944).

The style of the original group of artists that made up the Northwest School has continued on today. Many younger artists around the Pacific Northwest found resonance in how qualities of the region seemed so strongly evident in these earlier artists' works. Influences and inspirations traceable to these earlier painters can be seen in work by many conteporary artists. A notable example would be Jay Steensma, who left a large array of moody, misty, "northwesty" paintings-some of them titled with reference to Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Helmi Juvonen.

Artists like Photographer Mary Randlett and SculptorTony Angell are working artists whose work relates strongly to the Northwest School. Tony Angell’s sculpture often incorporates birds, much like Washington’s, Gilkey’s and McCracken’s work. The flowing and silhouette style of Angell’s work also very closely ties to McCracken’s sculpture. Mary Randlett takes black and white photographs of northwest landscapes that often have wonderfully painterly qualities.

Museum

The Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington is dedicated to the works of the original artists of the Northwest School and their successors.

List of Northwest School artists

• Guy Anderson
• Kenneth Callahan
• Doris Totten Chase
• William Cumming
• Richard Gilkey
• Morris Graves
• Paul Horiuchi
• Walter Isaacs
• Clayton James
• William Ivey
• Helmi Juvonen
• Leo Kenney
• John Franklin Koenig

• Philip McCracken
• Neil Meitzler
• Carl Morris
• Hilda Morris
• Ambrose Patterson
• Mary Randlett
• Jay Steensma
• Mark Tobey
• George Tsutakawa
• Windsor Utley
• James Washington, Jr.
• Wesley Wehr

Further reading

• Ament, Deloris Tarzan (2002), Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art, Seattle: University of Washington Press, ISBN 0295981474
• Conkelton, Sheryl, What It Meant to be Modern: Seattle Art at Mid-Century, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 1999. ISBN 0-935558-38-1.
• Conkelton, Sheryl, and Landau, Laura, Northwest Mythologies: The Interactions of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma WA; University of Washington Press, Seattle and London 2003
• Cumming, William, Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s And the Northwest School, University of Washington Press, 1984. ISBN 0-295-96156-2.
• Kingsbury, Martha, Art of the Thirties: The Pacific Northwest, University of Washington Press for Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and London 1972. ISBN 0-295-95215-6.
• Wehr, Wesley, The Accidental Collector: Art, Fossils & Friendships, University of Washington Press, 2004. ISBN 0-295-98382-5.

External links

• Museum of Northwest Art
• Foster/White Gallery
• Francine Seders Gallery
• Woodside/Braseth Gallery