Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art
by Deloris Tarzan Ament, with photographs by Mary Randlett
(University of Washington Press) $40

This lovely book is composed of 21 photographs of Northwest artists by Mary Randlett, who has been photographing local artists since the late '40s, and chapter-long biographies written by former Seattle Times art reviewer Deloris Tarzan Ament. The survey gives a good sense of not only some of the work that was produced in this part of the world, but also how these artists survived. The book also suggests a warning to any artist who wants to work entirely alone: Don't do it.

Though there never was any "Northwest School," insofar as a group of artists never wrote a manifesto and called themselves such, the idea of such a school was to determine the fate of four artists. In l953, Life magazine published an article called "Mystic Painters of the Northwest" that profiled and suggested aesthetic affinities between Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, and Kenneth Callahan.

On the one hand, this anonymous article by an East Coast out-of-towner brought national attention--and then money--to artists working in the then-frontier town of Seattle. On the other hand, it created a false sense of a "Northwest School." Though these four bristled at the idea of being labeled as a movement, there were close social ties between them and some similar aesthetic concerns: a subdued palette; common symbols; an interest in Asian art.

Of course, these four were not the only artists working at the time. Ament profiles other artists, such as Finnish eccentric Helmi Juvonen, African American sculptor James Washington Jr., and paleontologist and miniaturist Wesley Wehr, whose work, though Northwest in the sense of arising from the landscapes and color and history of this part of the world, has not been as widely acknowledged as the work of "the big four."

Hopefully, Ament's generous book will bring attention to other deserving 20th-century Northwest painters. REBECCA BROWN