By Carter Ratcliff "idr . I. -r"li i.i r, i... -'-ia : .t,j . :, cfrr q 'lffig ' -sr.1;-'"4 lf'"--'"- :.jt" t,.: '-rX' { .c.tsY a l.r";# ..:ii 11.; 'r:i::", i 1 : . i i :.. ! 'lr t'., tr .,,J. ,i4..: ffi- := &.., ffi Mark Tobey transformed the fluid lines of Eastern calligraphy into a unique I1o- d<!o style of abstract painting u:.> I I : rL .9uoi ln 1929, Mark Tobey exhibited a few recent paintings in Wi..o.ri, in 1890, he moved with his family to Chicago three ":t at Romany Marie's Cal6 Gallery in Greenwich Village. Romany years later. His father, a carpenter and building contractor, carved Marie's was a bohemian hangout far from the posh galleries on animals from stone-a weighty material very different in spirit _. i-!a.-,"[ Tobey's show would have faded from the ethereal refinement of his son's mature style. Young Mark o*>,,,7 Manhattan's 57th Street, and '<orl into oblivion long ago if it had not somehow managed to attract attended the school at the Art Institute of Chicago, but there is the attention of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. The founding director of the no evidence that his exposure to the Institute's extremely conser- ;o'6o-iio"t recently inaugurated Museum of Modern Art, Barr was ener- vative curriculum had much effect. Leaving after two years, he getic and adventurous and-most important of all-had a good found work as a fashion illustrator, first in Chicago and then in ;"'Ii^,o a eye. By including Tobey in a 1930 exhibition titled "Painting and New York, where he settled in 1911. Branching out, he became a t, By 1.917 he was proficient enough to attract the atten- -NL^ Sculpture by Living Americans," he launched one of most notable portraitist. l":^. in the history of 2Oth-century American art. tion of the Knoedler Gallery, which exhibited a selection of his >a"En careers Iri,-" in Tobey's early life foretold a notable future. Born charcoal portraits. ou>u: Nothing previous page: Mark Tobey, Trre Void Devouring the Gadget Era,l942, tempera on board, 21,875 x 30 in ' (55.56 x 76-2 cmr. -9U-.l T'" o r This page: pacifictuansitior, I943 tempera on paper, 23.25x31.25 in. (59.06 x 79,38 cm). WINTER 2o]7 ]a ART&ANT OUES 73 ffiffiffi 0 o o z o €m ?o t; i> z' o> oI z1 "I 9; ol r< <z !O z- 3In< 9a uo Om IO >o m; T> .-o OO This pase tempera on paper mounted on board, lO x 14.9 in. <25.4x37.94 cm.t, Following pagei Notthwest Dfift,1958 and gouache on paper laminated on board support, 44.69 x 35,625 in. (113.5 x 9O.S cm). fo o9 In L921., Tobey traveled cross-country to Seattle, the first of a worthy in the modern era. Vhat, for example, does Jackson Pol- <m series of journeys that would take him, eventually, to Europe and lock's teenaged enthusiasm for the teachings of Krishnamurti have !; the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. At the Seattle campus to do with his drip paintings of the late 1940s? In Tobey's case, .Washington, 3: of the University of he met a student named Teng however, his Bah6'i faith at the very least meshed with the spirit Kuei, who pointed him toward the Chinese calligraphy that would of his art and may well have shaped it. The Bah6'ibelief that all have profound influence on Tobey's understanding ofwhat paint- people are equal has as a corollary the equality of all cultures, an :o ing is-or might become. During the mid-792}s,Tobey traveled to idea that finds in echo in Tobey's openness to the world's various Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein, and on to Spain and Greece. styles of calligraphy. And an equalizing energy flows through his 1o His appetite for non-Western penmanship having been whetted paintings, creating a luminous mesh of intertwined forms. C: in Seattle, Tobey studied Arabic and Persian writing in Beirut, An artist who wants to make the scene is well advised to show !; Haifa, and Constantinople. up, a maxim lost on Tobey, who was forever departing for parts l< Before he left New York, Tobey had met a painter named Juliet unknown to denizens of the New York art world. Traveling to Thompson. A friend of Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese poet and vision- Devon, in Southwest England, rn1"931, he taught at the Elmhurst 1-< ary philosopher, Thompson was also a convert to the Bah6'i faith, Progressive School, taking time out to supply the school with !n which was founded in the mid-19th century on the belief that all frescoes and induct one of the faculty members into the Bah6'i Oo religions, like all people, are of equal value. Devoted to the ideal faith. From England he visited Mexico, France, and what was !r of a unified world, members of the faith are 1; anti-nationalist and then known as Palestine. A few years afterward, he visited Teng <I implacably pacifist. While having his portrait painted by Thompson, Kuei, his former student, in Shanghai and, near the Japanese city |,o Tobey read some Bah6'i literature. Impressed, he visited the Green of Kyoto, studied calligraphy at a Zen monastery. By 1935, Tobey Y! zn Acre Bah6'i School in Eliot, Me., and became a member of the faith. was back in Seattle, where the city's Art Museum mounted his {: Though the connection between, say, Catholicism and Italian first major solo exhibition. It was on this occasion that the world o, painting in the 16th century is clear, such links are not as trust- got its first extensive glimpse of his "white writing." ffi.;ii L'l {. €. 3i ,s ffi fu= =s i-*. a-'"ryg .t' ilfi x >3 -C <6 ,r C li3 rO !, m3 oo 39 >h z,tz z) ;{=; oo da 6: zfr OI oI !o m9 or O! z o@ ts! mj: ;la-. m ^o i:-3 Though many ol art criticism's standard phrases are more than showed there almost yeafly until the late 1950s. Among the painters 1ci a awkward, "white writing" makes a good if not a perfect Tobey's was Pollock. Impressed, he a friend little fit drawn to work wrote to En with Tobey's quietly shimmering imagery. Strictly speaking, his that TobeS seen in Manhattan as a'W'est Coast artist, proved that thin streaks white paint are brushstrokes, yet they perform none New York was not "the only place in America where painting (in the of the brushstroke's usual tasks. They neither generate an image real sense) can come thru." This remark joins with the similarities Ii of an object in pictorial space (as in realist painting) nor do they between the two painters to raise the question of influence. About ;I >l convey some personal attitude or quality of feeling (as in, for exam- the time that he first encountered Tobey's work, Pollock began mak- ple, Abstract Expressionism). Closely spaced and often connected ing the allover paintings that led, toward the end of 1945, to the drip =1 by angular zigs and zags, Tobey's marks seem at once precise and paintings that vaulted him to art-historical prominence. Did Pollock 1m i-3 utterly spontaneous. Filling the surface of a canvas edge to edge, learn alloverness from Tobey? Possibly he did, though all we can >l rP, his "white writing" creates a web one would call dense if it were know with any certainty is that his flung and spattered colors have a rI not so airy. Filled with subtly modulated space, Tobey's paintings flair, a pictorial drama, that Tobey deliberately avoids. !7hen asked pictorial, n? are unquestionably as are the marks of his brush. These about the subject of his webs of color, Pollock said that "every good ;9 works are in no sense written. Yet one senses in their linear inflec- painter paints what he is"-a self-centered response at odds with the tions the artist's lifelong immersion in calligraphy, and that justi- temper of Tobey's imagery. The equalizing impulse that evens out .2 fies to some extent the critics' talk of "white writing." the latter's fields of "white writing" carries over to his relationship ;- During the 1940s, the S7illard Gallery was one of the few in with his audience. Tobey does not address us with the bravura of f< New York to show work by members of the contemporary American the maestro. His mastery is quiet, drawing us into the subtly varied !i;! avant-garde. Tobey's first exhibition at $Tillard was in 1944, and he rhythms of implicitly infinite fields of incandescent white. Y. i{1m-z From left: Threading Light, 1942 tempera on board, 29.25 x19.75 in, (74.3 x 5O.2 cm); :o Untitled,1944, tempera on paper 20,25 x14 in. (51.44 x 35.56 cm). n! 76 ART&ANTrouEs wtNTER 2ol7-18 * > \ \t ri 1 c i \. : l ;, ; ihh .4 ')r ;> \, .,, z> .,,1'.t a7 q*, d <: untitled (Sumi Drawing),1957, ink on paper 20.375 x 28.5 in. (51.75 x 72.39 cm). By the end of the 1940s, the Abstract Expressionists were pro- Graves, Guy Ariderson, and Kenneth Callahan. Far from the art- ro claiming a postwar triumph. Vith a series of spectacular break- critical rhetoric and quickening art market of New York, these art- L, throughs on the pictorial front, they had moved the capital of istsrespondedtothelandscapeinthevicinityof Seattle,especially FF da <0 the avant-garde from Paris to New York.