Word: tobey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When he died of bronchitis in Basel last month at the age of 85, Mark Tobey had long been the favorite American painter of those who, in general, disliked American art. For them, Tobey was the quintessential expatriate: an old man of august refinement and blunt disposition who had settled in Switzerland 15 years before and proved his vision by amplifying it far from his roots on the Seattle coast...
...Tobey's work, small in size, immensely subtle in drawing, seemed distant from the large canvases and bold polemics of most New York painting. He had run through a number of incarnations: he supported himself as an illustrator in Chicago and New York after 1908 and was for a time a social portraitist before turning to more general figure and street scenes in the '20s and '30s. But Tobey was best known for his "white writing"-visions of abstract space wrought in thousands of strokes by a fine Japanese brush and bearing a more than accidental resemblance...
...stereotype of Tobey had emerged, and it was to affect his reputation in American art: the sage of the Pacific Northwest, perched on a misty crag, making exquisitely obscure calligraphic doodles. Tobey had worked for a year in China. At that time it was hardly possible for a painter to have done this without being regarded, in some circles, as a perambulating bodhisattva...
Thus catchwords stuck to Tobey's images: "ineffability," "infinity," "the void." The language has dated; the paintings have not. They are, in fact, much more rigorous than it was usual to suppose. Tobey is no longer considered an interpreter of the Orient to the Occident; his calligraphy does not even look particularly Eastern, especially since it has no literal meaning. What we now enjoy is the atmospherics: the coalescence of minutely knitted, sharply registered flicks of line rendering a pulsation of light like that of the moon through rain or neon glow over Broadway...
Energy Beyond Confines. When Jackson Pollock, some years later, explored a similar kind of overall notation and weblike space, his paintings were seen as the epitome of American gusto. It is a curious irony that Tobey, another American painter, having converted city life - crowds, bustle, swift perspectives - into the primary image of his art in the '30s and early '40s, should later have been so monotonously greeted as an Orientalist by other Americans. No doubt this has to do with the intimate scale of his paintings. In any case, the best of Tobey's work reminds...