A Birthday Tribute For A Northwest Art Icon

---------- ART REVIEW ----------

"Guy Anderson: Northwest Master," at the Seattle Art Museum, Thursday through March 2. Hours are Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays until 9 p.m. And "Guy Anderson: A 90th Birthday Tribute," at Woodside/Braseth Gallery, 1533 Ninth Ave., through Oct. 1. Hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Guy Anderson turns 90 on Nov. 20, and given his stature in Northwest art history, it's no surprise that everyone seems to be organizing retrospectives in his honor.

The Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner started the round of celebratory exhibits earlier this year with a worthy show of 26 paintings from the '60s through the '80s.

Last week, Woodside/Braseth Gallery opened an impressive exhibit of 38 works from 1970 through 1990 culled from Anderson's personal collection.

And on Thursday, the Seattle Art Museum opens a retrospective of 20 paintings from 1940 through 1986. Curated by Vicki Halper, SAM's associate curator of modern art, SAM's show includes a few works already exhibited in the La Conner show. The paintings were borrowed from regional private and public collections, with one painting coming from the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

Though now frail, Anderson remains one of the region's most beloved painters, partly because he has remained so loyal to the region. While other leading lights of his generation moved out of

the Northwest once their careers took off, Anderson has lived nearly his entire life in Edmonds, Seattle and La Conner.

Until his health faltered a few years ago, Anderson was known as a generous friend to other painters and fellow free spirits, such as his La Conner neighbor Tom Robbins. His modest La Conner home/studio served as an informal salon for decades for many Skagit Valley artists.

Over the years Anderson has often talked of the inspiration he finds in the natural beauty of the Northwest, especially in the seashores and fields around La Conner, where he has lived for nearly 40 years. And alone among the leading talents of his generation he incorporated Northwest Coast native imagery into his work on a regular basis. It doesn't take a scholar's background in Haida art to see the influence that Anderson's boyhood trips to the natural history museum had on his imagination.

Part of Anderson's fame comes from being one of the last surviving members of the generation of artists who, through their combined talents, first brought national attention to the Seattle art scene. Along with Mark Tobey, who died in 1976, Kenneth Callahan, who died in 1986, and Morris Graves, who lives a secluded life in northern California, Anderson was profiled in the now-famous Life Magazine article of 1953 as one of the "mystic painters of the Northwest."

Eastern art critics claimed to see a certain Asian contemplativeness in the painting of the Northwest "mystics." Life noted the gray palettes used by Northwest painters, their interest in figurative painting despite the explosion of abstract expression in New York's avant-garde circles, and the somber introspection found in many Northwest paintings. It all added up to what the Easterners saw as a defining regional art movement.

Northwest art historians argued then and now that the term "mystic painter" overlooked the differences among Tobey, Graves, Callahan, Anderson and the many others who also were part of the Seattle art scene of the '40s and '50s. Yet the term stuck, and the Life article has remained a important milestone in the art history of the region.

Though perhaps more "Northwestern" than Tobey, Graves and Callahan in that all of them eventually left the area, Anderson was, on the other hand, never quite as "mystical" as some of his friends. Anderson's big, energetic paintings were, even in the '40s and '50s, too full of muscular vigor to be "mystical" in the same way that Graves' small, lonely seabirds seemed to be shrouded in metaphysical mystery.

Anderson's interest in the spiritual, and in the universal themes of life and death, birth and regeneration, came out instead in his use of mythic imagery. He painted naked, faceless human forms floating above the earth and the sea. The forms, nearly always masculine, have been interpreted as angels, corpses, embryos, parachuting soldiers and even astronauts.

In her thoughtfully curated show at SAM, Halper has attempted to show the progression of Anderson's floating figures from his first use of them in the '40s through his highly stylized and symbolic use of the figures in the mid-'80s. Surprising to some viewers will be Anderson's experimentation with cubism in the '40s. In one of the earliest works in the show, "With Now Angel," 1944, a prone human figure swaddled in white floats in a cubist sky above a cubist landscape. Pablo Picasso might have painted it.

By the '60s, however, Anderson had abandoned his cubist style and moved clearly into the Haida-inspired modernism that he would continue to refine for the next 30 years. Like many paintings throughout his life, "Dream of a Language Wheel," 1962, is built around a large circle that can be seen as the cosmic center of the world, the moment of creation, a seed pod or the vortex of life. A man floats above the white swirling center; a fish and a bird leap above him. The imagery is mythic and dreamy. As always, Anderson is trying to paint the cosmic mysteries of universe and man's place in it.

In the '60s and '70s, Anderson's work also developed cloaked, and occasionally not-so-cloaked, political themes. A life-long pacifist, his solitary men floating through the sky have been read as soldiers parachuting out over unknown territory. Like Icarus, they have been trapped by man's hubris, and like the mythical young man who flew too close to the sun, Anderson's parachuting figures may be falling to their deaths.

Anderson's anti-war sentiments are more obvious in "Spring," a 1967 painting/collage. In that piece Anderson included torn bits of a New York Times advertisement taken out by a group of anti-war activists imploring the president to stop bombing Cambodia. Stylized human body parts float above the horizon of the painting, and instead of a big white vortex in the lower half of the canvas, Anderson painted a black hole. The hole represents death, or a grave, or simply the black horror of war.

Anderson has always stuck closely to earth tones occasionally punctuated with streaks of blood red, which he finds useful for his symbolic umbilical cords. In the SAM show, most of the paintings are white, black, gray and ochre, though given that Anderson has always worked in oil paint, even his most monochromatic paintings look rich and deeply textured.

There is more color in the work on view at Woodside/Braseth. In the '80s Anderson sometimes used wide swaths of green and blue in his paintings. One particularly beautiful work at Woodside/Braseth is "Aegean Vortex," a 1980 oil-on-paper that is composed around one of his signature white, cosmic centers.

Western Washington is lucky to have had such a gifted, generous-spirited, prolific painter in its midst for so many decades. And, for the next few months, it's lucky to have so much of his work on display.

Anderson panel

A panel discussion on Anderson's work will be held at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Seattle Art Museum. Participants will be Deloris Tarzan Ament, former Seattle Times art critic; Robert Sarkis, prominent collector; Wesley Wehr, a painter and longtime friend of Anderson's; and Martha Kingsbury, art historian. The discussion is free and open to the public.