Word: tobey
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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...
...young women are acute observers--their very immaturity allows them to see and wonder at the contradictions other people are forced to live with. In the title story, for example, Louise--just released from a private mental institution--finds herself a boarder at the home of the middle-aged Tobeys. Dennis Tobey is a minor celebrity--a dancer now laid up with Hodgkins' disease, but still the subject of adoring paeans delivered by his well-meaning friends. One of these assures his wife, Maria, "He was certainly never boring," but she knows better...
...curious partnership. Pollock was the son of a Nevada rancher who had moved on to California. Lee's father was a Jewish emigrant from Poland who owned a food store in Brooklyn. Pollock sweated out lonely struggles with himself. Krasner was more suggestible. Sometimes her work echoed Mark Tobey, other times Mondrian, most often De Kooning...