James Eldin Reed: Pacific Northwest Renaissance

Mark Tobey and the Pacific Northwest Modernists
Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was perhaps the most cosmopolitan of all American Modernist painters. With his "white writing" calligraphy and "all-over style," he is also among the most demanding.

Tobey, an adept of the Baha'i world faith, presided over the dialogue between art and religion so essential to Northwest Modernism from the 1920s to the 1960s.

In 1958 Tobey won the Palme d’Or at the Venice Biennale--the first American since Whistler--and in 1961 was the first living American to have a retrospective at the Louvre. John Cage, who knew Tobey from their Seattle days together, called him “an American Picasso.”

From the 1930s into the 1960s, Tobey and his prodigiously talented colleague Morris Graves (1910-2001), and many others, formed a widely-recognized School of artistic Modernism based in Seattle. Yet Tobey and the Northwest Modernists—celebrated in Paris as “L’Ecole du Pacifique”—have been generally neglected in New York and elsewhere in America (and in some parts of Europe) since the rise of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

The time has come to rediscover the body of their work, and the unique dialogue of Northwest Modernism, with its characteristic mix of political, environmental and spiritual concerns. The Northwest Modernists--in art and also in architecture--need to be reevaluated in the context of twentieth-century American culture and of the Modernist international.

Mary McCarthy’s Seattle
Born in Seattle in 1912 to a pioneer family, Mary McCarthy went on to become a formidable critic and a pillar of the New York Intellectuals. Yet in the substantial literature on McCarthy, inadequate attention has been paid to the formative influence of her coming of age in a certain place and time--in the "many-angled" Seattle of the 1920s, with its particular mix of cultural currents.

Accounts of McCarthy's religious development are also woefully lacking in historical context and nuance. Contrary to the received wisdom, Mary McCarthy, though indisputably a Modernist intellectual and critic, was never a confirmed atheist.

McCarthy’s best book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), evokes the exotic milieu of the old French-speaking Convent School at Forest Ridge, on Interlaken Boulevard, where Mary began her encounter with issues of intellectual culture and acquired the habit of disputation.

At length this "Child of the Sacred Heart" announced to her Mother Superior at Forest Ridge, "Ma Mere, I have lost my faith." But this was hardly the end of Mary McCarthy's encounter with Christianity.

Continuing her quest for knowledge and experience, this self-described "Northwest girl" began “exploring by foot, streetcar, and cable car, all the far-flung districts of Seattle, from Alki Point to Laurelhurst to Seward Park.” She went even farther culturally, from the White Russian-inflected Bohemia on Queen Anne Hill to the haunts of the young Northwest Modernist painters (with attendant sexual exploits).

Emily Carr in God’s Country
Emily Carr has been grouped with Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo as among the most original female masters of Modern Art. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, when the traditions of Northwest Coast Indian Art were still vital, she received her advanced training in Paris, where she exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1911 and “hung with the masters and rebels of modernism.” Returning to the Pacific Northwest in 1912 with her Post-Impressionist technique and Fauve palette, Carr struggled to produce a body of work—of brooding totems, dark green rain forests, and luminous skies on "great swirling canvases" (her Seattle colleague Mark Tobey's term)--which is unique in all the world. The oeuvre of Emily Carr, shaped at every critical juncture by the complications of her lifelong spiritual quest, practically defines the modern visual culture of the Northwest Coast.