Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Northwest School sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Northwest School (1930s – 1950s), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: Surrealism; it runs alongside one parallel movement, an indirect or contested link: Abstract expressionism.
The Northwest School was an American art movement established in the Seattle area. It flourished in the 1930s–40s.
The movement's early participants, and its defining artists, have become known as "the big four": Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Their work became recognized nationally from LIFE magazine's 1953 article Mystic Painters of the Northwest, which featured biographies and works of the four artists. The article was the first such broad recognition of artists from this corner of the world beyond traditional Northwest Native American art forms, which had been long recognized as "northwest art." Read more ↗