It's a different kind of voice, somehow removed from the conventional urgencies. No doubt it's his true voice, which some people, in a lifetime, never find.
Wehr, occupies a basement office in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture on the University of Washington campus. He's affiliate curator there, a voluntary position. As he speaks, he pushes back the silver hair falling over his hooded, Nordic-blue eyes that have seen much in his 73 years.
"They're gone and I'm still here," Wehr says of the painters and poets he once knew: Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Helmi Juvonen, Theodore Roethke, and others.
Wehr made their acquaintance when he was young, and they were not. He grew up in Magnolia, graduated from Queen Anne High School and entered the University of Washington in 1947. He sought his life's direction in the artistic milieu that was drawn to the University District, a few miles and a world away from Magnolia.
The young pianist, composer, painter and writer eventually found his artistic true north. In a 1962 article in The Seattle Times, Tom Robbins called Wehr the "most underrated painter in the Pacific Northwest."
Along the way, surrounded by artists and writers of international repute, Wehr carried a notebook and wrote things down: conversations and credos, anecdotes, situations and biographical insights. Among other accomplishments, Wehr is the Boswell of the 1950s and 1960s' Northwest arts scene.
His book, "The Eighth Lively Art, Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians and the Wicked Witch of the West," published two years ago by the University of Washington Press, was recently issued in paperback. Wehr has just signed the contract for a sequel, "The Collector, A Mid-Century Memoir: Art, Fossils & Accidents," due out next fall.
And in mid-November the Seattle Art Museum quietly opened two exhibits on the fourth floor, Mark Tobey: Smashing Forms, which features some 50 paintings by the cornerstone of the so-called Northwest School of Art, and Mark Tobey and Friends, which includes the work of Graves, Anderson, Paul Horiuchi, Mark Rothko, Marsden Hartley and Wehr. The show will run through April 6.
Wehr has also made a name for himself in another field: His "rock hounding," as Tobey once called it, led to the discovery of a major fossil site in Republic in the Okanogan Highlands.
For some artists, time, whether measured in decades or millions of years, is transparent as water. As Deloris Tarzan Ament wrote in her book, "Iridescent Light, the Emergence of Northwest Art," "Records of past life, from preserved snippets of conversation to fossilized impressions of leaves in shale, have been Wesley Wehr's abiding passion."
Wehr also, clearly, has a gift for friendship.
'Here we go again'
"If anyone glories in the past it tells me they really, thoroughly weren't in it at the time. It doesn't serve the past to be sentimental about it," Wehr says.
Wehr's stories are clear-eyed and unsentimental and fresh as this morning's coffee.
Here's a glimpse from his forthcoming "The Collector."
It's January 1966. A welcoming party has gathered for visiting poet Elizabeth Bishop at Niko's restaurant in the International District. In attendance are Graves, painters Richard Gilkey, Leo Kenney, William Cumming and his wife, poet Carolyn Kizer, and Beatrice Roethke, widow of poet Theodore Roethke.
"Graves and Kizer sat next to each other at the far end of the table," Wehr writes. "Not surprisingly, Carolyn was dominating the dinner table as she conversed rather loudly with Morris [Graves]. Being in a Japanese restaurant seemed to dictate the direction of their conversation.
"'I think life has a purpose but no meaning, Morris. Don't you agree?" she asked him.
"'No, Carolyn. Life has a meaning, but no purpose whatsoever,'" Morris responded.
"'Oh, God, here we go again!" I groaned to myself.'"
In "The Collector," Wehr is more transparent about another aspect of the Northwest painters' scene than he was in "The Eighth Lively Art."
"I took flak for not telling all," Wehr said of that book.
Wehr is referring to "the gay thing," as he puts it, which has been the unspoken, open secret of Northwest art, but Wehr is not interested in sociology or the psycho-sexual history of his friends.
"A lot of our life has been hinted at," he says. "We live in an age of stupid categories. They take away the uniqueness of human closeness. Such labels take us further away from understanding."
Wehr quotes Goethe: "You can't understand what you don't love."
Wehr recalls his mother standing up in a Lutheran church in Stanwood in the 1930s to urge tolerance for other religions.
"My God, she had guts to do that," he recalls. Later in life, he noted, she advised him to steer by his own lights.
Roethke's intensity
Wehr knows writing about old friends and acquaintances is a subjective process.
"I avoid writing about people I don't like," he says. Wehr has written much about Tobey and far less about Graves.
"Some of my memories of him [Graves] weren't too good," he allows.
Wehr took a poetry-writing class from Roethke, a formidable presence in the classroom. Wehr hasn't forgotten the experience: "Oh, God. Intense. Brilliant. He taught on a level that impacted your life. He was so emotional, I couldn't take it."
As he revisits the past, Wehr takes down from the shelf a sugar bowl that stood in his childhood home in Magnolia. On the front, there's a representational image of a hut and some trees by a lake. Slowly, Wehr turns the bowl around. On the back - horizontal lines, much like the patterns found in some of his paintings.
Wehr gives a quick smile.
"Like a forest glimpsed in the night, a Wehr painting is an evocation of loneliness," Ament wrote in "Iridescent Light."
In that same book she quotes poet Elizabeth Bishop on Wehr's work: "The people at his table would fall silent and stare at those small, beautiful pictures, far off into space and coolness ... So much space, so much air, such distances and loneliness on those flat little cards ... who does not feel a sense of release, of calm and quiet, in looking at these little pieces of our vast and ancient world ...?"
At SAM's Mark Tobey and Friends exhibit, Wehr's two pictures, like a quiet voice in the corner, are the smallest in the room. Nearby hang the larger, darker pictures of Helmi Juvonen, who was institutionalized until she died in 1985. Wehr stuck by Juvonen during her confinement, curating shows of her art in museums around the Northwest.
"The Eighth Lively Art," is part of the Tobey exhibit: The book sits on a wooden bench in the Mark Tobey and Friends room. It's there as a resource, as a way for viewers to sit down, open a book and enter the Northwest's artistic world of four and five decades ago.
"I've never felt that I was that interesting," Wehr says. "I've known interesting people, and I've had an interesting life."
Art historians and Wehr's many friends would no doubt argue otherwise.
Mark Tobey: Smashing Forms, and Mark Tobey and Friends, continue at the Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St., through April 6. The pictures are drawn from the Seattle Art Museum collection. For more information call 654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org.[[In-content Ad]]
