The Modernist revolution in the arts and culture has received general treatment from a number of eminent historians, including, most recently, Peter Gay of Yale in Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Norton, 2007). Because the movement began in Europe and came late to America—with the iconoclastic Armory Show of 1913—historical accounts of Modernism in the United States have tended to be episodic and to focus obsessively on New York to the neglect of other centers of cultural activity. In the conventional narrative, the “triumph of American painting” had to await the Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Pacific Northwest Renaissance: Religion and Cultural Modernism in an Unfinished Landscape, a work-in-progress by the Harvard-based historian James Reed, suggests the limitations of this Manhattan-provincial triumphalism and vigorously disputes the conventional wisdom that Cultural Modernism—in literature as well as art and architecture—was predisposed to "heresy" or fundamentally hostile to religion.
Pacific Northwest Renaissance is the first comprehensive account of the brilliant flowering of artistic and literary culture on the Northwest Coast beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the early 1960s. This remarkable but little-studied development was, Reed demonstrates, arguably the most significant Modernist movement in North America to take root and flourish outside of New York.
Though largely forgotten today, the Northwest Renaissance was recognized as strikingly original at the time by cultural observers and critics, not only in New York but in Europe. Among its distinguishing characterists were direct experience of Northwest Coast Indian art and culture and of Asian civilizations, and a systematic effort to reconcile the claims of religion with the worldview of twentieth-century Modernism.
In New York, the Northwest Modernists were recognized as a distinct school beginning in the early 1940s, before the emergence of Jackson Pollock and company. At the Museum of Modern Art, the work of Morris Graves was all the rage in 1942. Beginning in 1944 and extending into the 1960s, the paintings of Graves and Mark Tobey and other Northwest artists were exhibited regularly at the Willard Gallery on East 72nd Street , where they hung with the likes of Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger. In 1962 Tobey, by then world-famous, had his retrospective at The Modern.
In Paris during the 1950s the Northwest Modernists were referred to collectively in avant-garde circles as constituting a uniquely American “Ecole du Pacifique,” a humanistic and contemplative alternative to the often flamboyant self-indulgence of the New York School. In 1958 Tobey won the Palme d’Or at the Venice Biennale (beating out Mark Rothko among others)—the first American since Whistler to be so honored—and in 1961 Tobey became the first living American to receive a retrospective at the Louvre. Andre Malraux, France's Minister of Culture and a towering art critic and literary intellectual, presided over the grand opening on the Rue de Rivoli.
In architecture, too, Northwest Modernism was recognized in critical circles as a distinctive school. Its most eminent practitioner, Pietro Belluschi of Portland--later an intellectually-influential dean of architecture at MIT--was best known for his modernist churches, one of which, in Oregon, was hailed by the theologian Paul Tillich as the very symbol of "holy emptiness."
The Northwest achievement in Modern art and architecture was paralleled by a renaissance in literature, particularly inpoetry, spearheaded by Theodore Roethke and his many students, including David Wagoner, Richard Hugo, and Carolyn Kizer. During the 1950s and early 1960s Roethke was grouped with Robert Lowell and others as a major "confessional" poet and as one of America’s most distinctive poetic voices, and he had the major literary awards to justify that reputation.
These Seattle-based poets, together with their colleague in Portland, William Stafford—and a brilliant circle of literary lights, including Malcolm Lowry, just over the international border in Vancouver—created a notable body of work that was at once regional in the best, most authentic sense, yet universal in its themes, aspirations and appeal.
So great was the self-confidence of those years, when Seattle constituted itself as a kind of Parnassus on the Pacific, that Carolyn Kizer, writing in The New Republic, proclaimed the emergence of
“a distinct culture area” in the Pacific Northwest.
More modestly, perhaps, William Stafford wrote from Portland of "the deepest place we have": "They call it regional, this relevance-- / the deepest place we have: in this pool forms the shadow of our land, a lonely one, / responsive to the wind. Everything we own / has brought us here: from here we speak."
Pacific Northwest Renaissance focuses on the outstanding painters and poets who, in their individual struggles for purity of vision and artistic truth, created the culture of Northwest Modernism. It evokes the lost world of their vigorous interaction, where the poet Theodore Roethke was in creative dialogue with the Northwest artists, the painter Mark Tobey worked steadily at his poetry and composed his Suite for Flute and Piano to be performed publicly in Seattle, and Merce Cunningham—the last of the Northwest Modernists—danced for Morris Graves.
Pacific Northwest Renaissance delineates the unique cultural dialogue of Northwest Modernism—so different from that of the New York School and of formalist critics like Clement Greenberg—with its characteristic mix of socio-political, environmental, and spiritual preoccupations.
The book dwells at length on issues of artistic creativity and religion—Theosophy and Baha'i, Zen Buddhism and other Eastern religions to be sure, but mere Christianity, even institutional Christianity as well—as they were debated, and worked through aesthetically, in Northwest Modernist circles.
Pacific Northwest Renaissance, in sum, evokes the lost world of the Northwest Modernists. It is an act of recovery of a distinctive movement within Cultural Modernism which in its day participated fully in the cosmopolitan culture suggested by the concept of an International Style, yet was simultaneously rooted in the unique regional environment that Theodore Roethke, in one of his best poems, termed “the far field"--"in the corner missed by the mower.”
The work is comprehensive, critical, and transnational in range, taking care to place the Northwest Modernists in their national and international contexts.
The book is a signal contribution to the historical and philosophical problematic of Modernism generally. For scholars of American Studies and American Religon, it represents the first sophisticated analysis, on any continent, of the tangled relationship between Religion and Cultural Modernism.
Brilliantly conceived, thoroughly researched, and beautifully written, the book recreates a luminous yet half-forgotten moment in American cultural life.
The book should appeal to a wide readership, including general readers interested in Modernism, and in American cultural, religious, and intellectual history. For general readers—in the Northwest, the Northwest diaspora, and elsewhere—Pacific Northwest Renaissance can of course be read as a regional cultural history, the first of its type.
Though a work of general nonfiction and conceived to be marketed as a trade book, several chapters of Pacific Northwest Renaissance have been presented formally in Harvard seminars on American cultural history. A detailed prospectus of the work, together with additional chapters, can be obtained from the author.
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