Were painter Morris Graves still with us — and many claim he is, spiritually — he would turn 100 this week. Born in 1910, he grew up in a Seattle far different than the traffic-choked, sophisticated city laden with Rem Koolhaus and Frank Gehry architecture. The Seattle of Graves’ youth was one where Fourth Avenue was the main thoroughfare; where William Boeing was known because of his timber interests; where Nellie Cornish dreamed of running a school devoted to painting, theater, and dance.

Graves came of age in a time when he would have seen the Seattle Union Star, Seattle’s labor paper, document agitation between Wobblies and returning World War I vets. And he would have seen the rise in fraternal organizations, whose ranks were swelled by those returning soldiers.

The popularity of such fraternal organizations provided fodder for H. L. Mencken’s acerbic commentary on the American scene. Instead of the Fraternal Order of the Eagles; the Loyal Order of the Moose, or the Elks, Mencken suggested the formation of new societies: “The Mysterious Brotherhood of the Epileptic Handshake,” or the "Liquorish Louts of Hideous Heiroglyphics” or “The Despondent Sorority of Esoteric Virgins,” among others.

While Mencken lampooned the Eagles, established in Seattle, 1898, his sympathies would have found accommodation in a fraternal organization also founded in Seattle, some 90 years hence: The Mystic Sons of Morris Graves, Seattle Lodge 93.

Inspired by the agitprop antics of Tristan Tzara and his dadaist cohorts, the Mystic Sons is the misbegotten child of Charlie Krafft, himself known as Seattle’s oldest promising young artist, and occasional abettor Larry Reid, former impresario of galleries Rosco Louie and Graven Image. Formed with the imprimatur of their friend Graves, the unorthodox structure of the fraternity — no bylaws, no meetings, and membership loosely conferred (and firmly retracted, in at least one instance) by Krafft — the Mystic Sons rears its mischievous head when the local art establishment takes itself too seriously, becomes boring, or both.

With Reid’s unmatched promotional skills, the Mystic Sons has deployed several subversive productions designed to provoke or simply amuse. In the mid-1990s, the height of enthusiasm for Pilchuck and other faddish glass works, the Mystic Sons held a raffle, with tickets sold in a Pioneer Square booth during First Thursdays, to smash a Chihuly vase. More than 1,000 tickets were sold; local media were eating from Reid’s hand.

Graves, who died at his Loleta, Calif. home in 2001, was delighted to see his namesake rabble-rousers up-end the art-culture’s lowest common denominator. Graves’ ouevre — meditative, inquisitive, haunting — belied the man’s prankish streak.

The biographical facts of Grave’s development are well known. Born in Oregon, Graves grew up in the Puget Sound country where the coastal imagery — muted colors, shorebirds, mist — was indelibly imprinted in his consciousness. With short diversions that took him to Texas, Japan, Los Angeles, and Europe, Graves remained a Northwesterner while refining his draughtsmanship and style. In 1936, Graves was given a one-man show at the Seattle Art Museum. His Rolls-Royce arrival at the opening, bedecked in formal wear and tennis shoes, was a gesture echoed decades later by Kurt Cobain when, for the cover of Rolling Stone, the musician wore a T-shirt upon which he scrawled “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” Both were pranks, but with nips at the hands that fed them and with indications of discomfort with commercial success.

If Graves’ insolence was directed at the provincialism of Seattle’s art scene, he had no need to worry that such shenanigans might limit his painterly reputation, for within a few years he was included in the seminal exhibit “Americans 1942,” a mounting of 18 artists from nine states at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Having transcended regionalism, the elation Graves experienced would have been tempered by mail informing him of induction into the U.S. Army. That relationship, predictably ill-conceived, lasted mere months.

Discharged, Graves, ever the bohemian at 6' 3" and wearing the occasional cape, was once again seen walking Seattle’s University Way.

During that period, Hollywood called in the corpulent form of Charles Laughton. In Seattle to support a World War II bond drive, Laughton was captured by the mysteriousness of Graves’ paintings and exclaimed, "Who did these? Where is he? How can I meet him?” By now Graves had entered a semi-hermetic life on “the Rock,” a well-designed shack without water or electricity sited on an outcropping of Fidalgo Island. Despite that remoteness, Laughton found Graves; at their first encounter, according to Laughton, they “sat up talking until seven in the morning.” How that went over with Laughton’s wife, actress Elsa Lanchester, is unknown. But after Laughton died — with Graves at his deathbed — Lanchester sold the couple’s collection of Graves paintings.

By then Graves had moved off the Rock to Woodway, near Edmonds, but not before being depicted as a minor character, “Lawrence Warren,” in Nancy Wilson Ross’s “I, My Ancestor” (Random House, 1950). (New Yorker critic John Broderick wrote that the reader is “left aghast” at the interminable peregrination of the novel’s protagonist.)

Bolstered by that attention and a little money, Graves grew a full beard to ensure against the possibility of gainful employment in those narrow, button-down 1950s.

If Ross’s book was less than critically successful, a 1955 essay by Kenneth Rexroth, “The Visionary Paintings by Morris Graves” in Perspectives USA and later printed in his collection Bird in the Bush laid laurels at Graves’ feet, placing him in a pantheon containing Chinese, Japanese, and European masters — Sung Dynasty painters, Sesshu and early Jean de Bosschère. Rexroth even goes so far as to cite some resemblance in his work to early Klees. Despite such lofty comparisons, Rexroth suggests that Graves was unaware of his predecessors — thereby further emphasizing Graves’ stature as his own man.

With MOMA’s acquisition of Graves’ works “Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye,” “Bird in Moonlight” and “Blind Bird,” Rexroth wrote that critics could now see “that here was a really different yet thoroughly competent artist.”

With acclaim came financial security. By 1955 Graves had moved to Woodtown Manor, a faded 18th century stone mansion oustide Dublin. After six or so years, he returned stateside for the opportunity to buy acreage in Loleta, in Humboldt County, upon which he built a house designed by Ibsen Nelsen. Graves lived there the rest of his life.

With the realization that the centennial of Graves’ birth would pass without recognition, Krafft sprang to action, organizing an invitational exhibit of works done in tribute to Morris Graves. With some 150 works represented, the show at the Rock/DeMent Rock|DeMent, Corridor and Angle Galleries (within the Tashiro Kaplan building, Third Avenue and South Washington) will conclude this Saturday (Aug. 28) with a séance — open to Mystic Sons and contributing artists — designed to raise the spirit of Morris Cole Graves. With typical bluster, Krafft and Reid prepared a press release that mentions a few of the contributing artists; interspersed among them are some marquee names — Susan Rothenberg, Maya Lin, Charlie Manson — indicative of Krafft’s and Reid’s chicanery.

Among the show’s standouts, Ries Niemi’s denim biker vest is a pleasantly garish tribute to Graves and the Mystic Sons. Embroidered between the Mystic Sons logo in head- and tail-banners (“Skagit Valley Drag Chapter”) is an image of the bearded Graves wearing a gold wig and lipstick. With a nod to Woody Guthrie, the phrase “This Machine Kills Pop Artists” is interspersed among two intersecting paint brushes, a la crossbones.