Book Description
Although the four artists exchanged ideas and shared common interests, they were close friends and colleagues for only a few years around the time of World War II. Each experimented with stylistic elements admired in the others’ painting, yet they produced distinctive, widely ranging bodies of work over their long careers. What fundamentally united these artists was their philosophical approach to artmaking, one that rested on humanism and their passionate belief in art as a moral pursuit.
Constructing a chronology from letters, interviews, and new analyses of their works, Northwest Mythologies reexamines the careers and complex friendships of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson, and explores their different understandings of what it meant to be an artist. This book is the first study of the four painters to finely articulate their differences and achievements, and it presents a new view of their place in American art.
