While working for the WPA Federal Art Project in 1939, he met the painter Mark Tobey, 20 years his senior, who taught him new techniques including painting on delicate Chinese paper with tempura. The two artists had a tempestuous relationship, played out in letters that Graves eventually burned, thinking them too personal. Although he spent most of the 1930s traveling and painting, Graves also began his search for a remote and soul-satisfying home. He paid $40 at a tax auction to buy 20 acres on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes, north of Seattle. In 1940 he began work on a house/studio there. Perched on the edge of a cliff with views of the Cascades and Puget Sound, the retreat he called The Rock would be his home until 1947. It was there that he produced some of his most famous work, including the Inner Eye and the Maddened Birds series. Until The Rock, Graves hadn’t sold much work. And he had fallen into reticent ways that lasted all his life, rebuffing gallery owners and museums, needing repeated persuading before agreeing to showings. He resisted at first when Miller from New York’s Museum of Modern Art wanted to include him in a 1942 MoMA show titled, “18 Americans from 9 States.” Eventually he yielded, but downplayed the work in correspondence with Marian Willard of Willard Gallery in New York City, who became his lifelong art dealer and friend. He told her that he sent the MoMa “70 unframed, half-conceived — and far, far less than half-painted things … a heap of half-dreamed-up ideas leaning to the poetic but out of no conviction sufficient to force itself into a language — and coasting on the voiced enthusiasms of friends. I think they prove by their lack of vitality that I’ll never be much of a painter.”
Despite his misgivings, the show was a hit. MoMA ended up buying 11 of his paintings for its permanent collection and everything else he showed sold. He followed that with a solo show at the Willard Gallery and was featured at the prestigious Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, D.C. Vanity Fair wrote glowingly of him and his work — all in 1942. Graves shrunk from the attention. He didn’t want to be famous. He wrote to the editor of Vanity Fair complaining, “I consider publicity more than an intrusion. Slight as it has been, it becomes, in the minds of even a few, the threshold of reputation — under such pressure I am rendered vacant. Time would possibly relieve this — but, to avoid obscuring my meaning, I will say that in my very plasm is the need of privacy carried to obscurity.”
Nevertheless, his prominence kept growing. In 1953 Graves, Tobey and fellow painters Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan were featured in an extensive 1953 Life magazine piece titled “Mystic Painters of the Northwest.” His place in art history was now solid, freeing him to flirt with departures that would be less well-received, including a sculpture series, “Instruments for a New Navigation,” inspired by U.S. space exploration. All along, Graves kept running up against authorities who didn’t share his worldview. He tried to become a conscientious objector during World War II, and instead spent months in a stockade before a military psychiatrist recognized that he’d never adapt to military life. In 1947, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Japan, but he made it only as far as Hawaii before being refused entry to Occupied Japan. It’s unclear why. But a gay continued on next page northcoastjournal.com • NORTH COAST JOURNAL • THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 2013
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