The Mystic Artists: A Puget Sound Quest

THE painting - a big, dark cityscape of Seattle as seen from Capital Hill, with Lake Union shining like a whale in the foreground and the hump of Queen Anne Hill rising behind into the belly of a low black cloud - is so tactile and kinetic it makes you want to touch the paint. And that's exactly what John E. Braseth, co-owner of the Gordon Woodside/John Braseth Gallery in Seattle, does.

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"Spirit Bird Study," a 1952 work by Graves.

"My God, I never noticed those figures in the foreground - see them on the steps?" Mr. Braseth is rubbing a thumb over two barely discernible pedestrians on a flight of stairs at the painting's lower left corner.

Though I keep my hands to myself, I share Mr. Braseth's excitement. This 1942 Kenneth Callahan oil on board called "Lake Union, Capitol Hill" is the grail I've been searching for - an iconic Seattle setting painted by an iconic Northwest master. Ever since a 1953 Life Magazine article anointed Callahan, along with his fellow Seattle artists Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Guy Anderson, "Mystic Painters of the Northwest," they have become local legends known as the "Big Four." Never mind that by the time the article appeared, they were barely on speaking terms. The label stuck. Rightly or wrongly, the mystics are still the region's main claim to artistic fame.

And yet, for titans, they are surprisingly elusive in their own city. There are no plaques on their houses; no snapshot-encrusted bars or cafes; with the exception of Pike Place Market, which Tobey sketched over and over, hardly any recognizable urban landmarks or vistas that they claimed as their own. Which is why I'm so thrilled to be standing just inches from Callahan's 1942 oil. It's from the period when the artists were closest, gathering weekly at Tobey's University District studio or the Capitol Hill house of Kenneth and Margaret Callahan to talk politics and art. This was their world - dark, stormy, torn by depression and war. This was their default palette - subdued, grayed-out earth tones and slate blues with the occasional neon blaze of saturated color.

The Woodside/Braseth Gallery, which recently relocated to the fast-developing Denny Triangle neighborhood at the northern fringe of downtown, has the best collection of this group's paintings of any Seattle gallery: gem-like Tobey abstractions that fuse Jackson Pollock drip and Roman mosaic; enigmatic Graves birds; big muscular Anderson canvases of nudes floating on coils of black and gray. But with this Callahan, I finally feel that I'm looking at their city through their eyes.

It's chilly and gray, autumn draining into winter, the day I scout for the artists' footsteps on Capitol Hill, a wonderful old Seattle neighborhood where mansions rub shoulders with modest apartments. Tobey taught here, Callahan lived here, and all of them exhibited at the original Seattle Art Museum, which Dr. Richard E. Fuller, a local collector, planted at the crown of the hill amid the lawns and conifer groves of Volunteer Park. The symmetrical 1933 Art Deco concrete confection was admired in its day, but to me it has the pumped-up staginess of a world's fair pavilion. The rigid symmetry carried through to the displays: in the south gallery went Asian bronzes, jades, ceramics and Japanese ink scrolls, while in the north gallery hung changing exhibits of regional artists, including, at one time or another, all of the four.

Morris Graves was 23 when the museum opened. He was 6 feet 6 inches tall, strikingly handsome, gaunt, gay, eccentric - the Artist with a capital "a." His friend and fellow painter William Cumming described him as "thin and smoldering" with "dark and liquid" eyes that "seemed to look through people and birds and rotting fruit at the timeless patterns engraved there by the hand of God." Mesmerized by the aura of Dr. Fuller's Shang dynasty bronze vessels bathing in the pearly light of the Northwest, Graves began painting visions of the "inner eye" - haloed moons, startled birds and vessels caught in the act of transforming themselves into sharp-eyed rodents.

Tobey, 20 years older than Graves, urbane, goateed, fiercely professional, was a veteran of the New York and Paris art scenes when he returned to Seattle in the late 1930's. He too was captivated by Dr. Fuller's Asian collection. By the end of the decade, something about Chinese calligraphy and the nervous energy of the young Western city hoisting itself out of the Depression fused in Tobey's imagination and he made the great breakthrough of his "white writing" - an all-over web of white scribbled over a vaguely recognizable urban iconography.

Graves, secretly but intensely ambitious (Tom Robbins called him "a genuine mystic" and "a master showman"), was intrigued. "He used to come here night after night," Tobey complained to a friend. "Night after night, lie on the floor, ask me to show him my work, and pore over my paintings. Study them. Then stole them." The rift between Tobey and Graves over the white writing triggered "incredible scenes" all over the city, according to Mr. Cumming.

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