Northwest School (art)

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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 movement's early participants were Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. 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.

The principal artists of the Northwest School were Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, James Washington Jr., Clayton James, Richard Gilkey, Philip McCracken, Wesley Wehr and Helmi Juvonen. All of these artists were from a similar age group, and all were greatly influenced by the Pacific Northwest environment. The influence of the natural setting of Western Washington, especially the Skagit Valley, was the 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. The sculptors among this group mainly used natural stone and ceramic. The use of these medis for their sculpture helped them express the feeling of the Northwest through their art.

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 tonal ranges in the color is one of the most important aspects 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 have been labeled as mystics, although most denied this forcefully and none of them were in any actual group that worked together. They actually denied being a "school" of art, but they have been grouped this way because all of their styles were influenced by similar things and therefore their artwork has major unifying themes.

The foundations of the Northwest style were the "Big four" – Tobey, Callahan, Graves, and Anderson. These are considered the basis of the Northwest School, while the others were leading and secondary figures in the movement. Many of them were influenced by Eastern styles. Also there was some influence from surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism that shows in some of their work. 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. Artists like Tony Angell are current members of the Northwest School. Their work is very similar to the original northwest artists in overall style of their work. 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.

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.