Wesley Wehr began having conversations with artists and writers of the Pacific Northwest when he was a teenager. In 1949, as a 19-year-old music student, Wehr was recruited to teach composition to Mark Tobey, who was then a well-known, 60-year-old painter. When, several years later, the painter told his young friend, "Now this is important. You will need to remember this," and quoted something from Leonardo, Wehr began to take notes. Thereafter, Wehr recalls in his book, "I... soon began noting other things Tobey said to me... he talked about so many things--about art, music, life.... I simply wrote down everything; the profound remarks, the trivial tirades.... I was secretive about these notes, afraid that he wouldn't talk so freely if he suspected I had become some sort of self-appointed Boswell."
After Wehr had read Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt's Table Talk, which records exchanges between Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and other early 19th-century English writers, he found himself not only writing down what Tobey said, but also the words of other artists, musicians, and writers working in the Northwest. This included folks like Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, Helmi Juvonen, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Ernst Bloch, and Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.
Though Wehr's book is full of personal anecdotes, it is restrained: the respectful reminiscences of a loving friend as opposed to the trash-talk of a gossip. Wehr was committed to conveying his friends' ideas and lives as they had been presented to him. There's nothing superior in his tone, none of the know-it-all psychobabble that infects too many contemporary biographies. Wehr made notes on his conversations with his friends after he got home from dinners out with them at Lee's restaurant or Mannings' coffeehouse (two hangouts in the University District), studio visits, or late nights in some equally earnest fellow student's room. He was careful to represent his friends accurately: "Not being confident that I had always caught the gist or the exact words of these conversations, I made every effort later to run them past various close friends of the people whose words I had recorded. I would get a quick smile of recognition or a 'That's it!'--and I knew I was on the right track." Taking notes like this is harder than it sounds, as I discovered when I met Wehr for a conversation.
I met Wehr at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, where an exhibit of paintings by him and some of his friends has recently opened. "It's a little like Old School Day," Wehr laughed as he showed me work that his pals Tobey, Anderson, Juvonen, Horiuchi, Steensma, etc. had made in the '50s and '60s. Some of Wehr's new work is similar to work they were all doing back then, with muted palettes heavy on the black and gray and green and brown, abstracted landscapes with a vaguely Asian feel. Hermosa, a very small, richly textured three-color oil pastel, is related to romantic landscapes Wehr painted several decades ago. He said, "I painted what I found beautiful about this place, the water, the sky." These tiny pieces, some only an inch or two across, are like landscapes you could carry in your pocket, places you could go to with a private, secret glance.
Then there is Wehr's recent work, which is very different indeed. There's a lot of goofy, whimsical, sort of expanded stick figures in the new work. One piece is done on a cheap note card bought, Wehr confessed cheerfully, at Value Village ("I like to buy my stationery there."). The original image is an insipid bouquet of flowers; Wehr has drawn a slightly hungover-looking face beneath the bouquet. It looks like a bad morning after. In Y2K Trio, three separate stick figures connect like Siamese triplets. They have completely demented faces. They look exactly like what I have always been afraid computers think of me. They're drawn with a black, fine-lined, felt-tipped pen, then colored in with red and blue and yellow, a kid's or Calder's palette. Family Reunion is full of similarly quirky figures, but many of them have been obliterated by a layer of black--an accurate way to depict a clan-gathering that appears at first to be cheerful, but in fact is fraught with absence, exclusion, darkness.
Wehr is not at all lost in nostalgia for a mythical Golden Era. When I asked him what he thought about work going on now in the Pacific Northwest, he was so excited he could hardly sit still. "There's so much good work these days. Most of it's on the walls of coffee shops or tiny galleries. I bought a really wonderful piece recently for $15...." Wehr's been a big fan of Alice Wheeler's photographs years before the exhibit at SAM.
Part of the pleasure in looking at Wehr's small pieces is getting up close enough to see what's almost hidden. There's a similar pleasure to his book. Though much of the book is in short paragraphs of informal dialogue, there is a cast of something very serious, very moral about how artists live and make their art. Wehr and his friends began making art here in the Northwest before there was any real money for the arts. They weren't tempted to alter their work to make it more appealing to grant applications; the work was not created to satisfy someone's idea of civic usefulness. For a long time these artists had only themselves as an audience. They made art because they wanted to or were compelled to, not because it might provide them with a career.
At the same time, these artists were wonderfully practical. Helmi Juvonen hung her block prints in the doorway of a University print shop, with a note telling folks to help themselves and put 50 cents per print into the coffee can by the door. Sometimes she was able to sell enough work in a weekend at the Pike Place Market that she could live off it for a week. Juvonen introduced herself to Wehr when he was working as a weekend guard at the Henry Art Museum at the University of Washington. (He still works at the UW, now as a paleontologist at the Burke Museum.) This is how Wehr remembers that first meeting with Juvonen:
"One Saturday afternoon a woman strode quickly... into the museum office carrying two shopping bags. She wore a brightly flowered blouse and skirt. Her clothes were Nordic and peasant-like in their hand-embroidered simplicity. It was difficult to guess this rather strange woman's age. Her voice, high-pitched and excitable, was childlike. She introduced herself to me and... began to unwrap some of the ceramics that were in her two shopping bags. She had just delivered some of her handmade ashtrays and keychains to Dorothy's Gift Shop in the Olympic Hotel downtown.... 'I'm a very practical person,' she explained. 'I've always known how to make a living as an artist, one way or another.'" Juvonen became a good friend of Wehr's.
She also became obsessed with Mark Tobey, going so far as to send out announcements of their upcoming marriage. Tobey, to whom this imminent wedding was news, was horrified. His horror might be what you see in Juvonen's amazing block print of a masked Tobey, currently showing at Woodside/Braseth.
Tobey wasn't the only person who found Juvonen's eccentricities troubling. In 1959 she was made a ward of the state, and sent to a convalescent center in Elma, Washington. There she continued, despite the circumstances, to produce paintings, block prints, and ceramics. She was also guardian to Mrs. Dill Pickle, a remarkably fertile tabby feline. Juvonen's work was widely exhibited throughout the 1980s, and though she often attended her own openings, she always made a point of getting back to the convalescent center in Elma to feed her cats.
Last year some of Juvonen's work was included in the Henry exhibit What It Meant to Be Modern. Her work, with its odd mix of nightmare and whimsy, Native Northwest design and 1930s social realism, and image and text, foreshadowed some of the jarring, exciting juxtapositions going on in contemporary visual art. I hope Wehr's book will help introduce Juvonen's amazing work to a new generation.
Art often asks to be a public thing. A book wants to be read, a painting seen, a composition heard. But an artist's life is a human life, with its own flaws and weaknesses, its own peculiar, private joys. Wehr's book about some of his well-known friends could have included all sorts of personal things that, if you were some sort of Sally Jesse Raphael type, you'd flip straight to the index to find--things about sex, envy, failure, shame. But Wehr is a moral man, a friend in whom another friend, confiding things, could trust. The Eighth Lively Art is a record of conversations between artists that can help readers understand contexts for work that was produced here in the Northwest a few decades ago. It is also a document whose style is similar to the work it describes: informal but elusive, familiar but restrained. During our conversation, Wehr said to me, "You have to be able to love something to begin to understand it." His book comes from the kind of curiosity and love that inspires groups of artist friends to make art and conversation together.
