Arts and Letters

About two months before Tobey died, I happened to be in Geneva and called him at his home in Basel where he had lived since 1960. Uncertain as to whether he would come to the phone, I was delighted to hear his familiar laugh of greeting. I don't know whether he really remembered who I was, but he enjoyed our exchange about growing old together and continued to laugh frequently with that delightful kind of Zen laughter which always characterized him, and which implied that he was a master of life, rather than a servant, even in his declining sensibilities.

A week or two later I had to go to Basel quite unexpectedly, and paid my first visit there to the Museum of Modern Art with its superb but poorly hung and lit collection of twentieth-century works. After wandering through the first few galleries full of everyone from Picasso through the German Expressionists to Andy Warhol, I suddenly was confronted by a work which literally took my breath away. For the first time in the museum a painting seized me not only with its painterly excitement, but also with its immediate transporting of me into a world of spatial and spiritual timelessness unlike any other work in the entire collection. It was not very large, as so many paintings are these years, but its force was so great that it seemed to explode out through the wall into an eternity of energy and spiritual passion. It was, of course, a work by Tobey, painted originally in 1964 as a mural for the Seattle Opera House, but, deemed too small, was acquired instead by the Basel Museum. There it is now, and like Michelangelo's last great Pietà in Milan, is sufficient excuse for a visit from anywhere in the world to that generally gray city.

Perhaps our existence in an age of scientific materialism makes less apposite the kind of spiritual energy which occupied Tobey all of his creative life. Perhaps the kind of physical or emotional acrobatic adornments of, say, Jackson Pollock are easier to wear than the less material garments of Tobey's ecstasies. Yet we are still human beings capable of travelling far beyond a world of physical and emotional gravities. To encounter Pollock, and most of Tobey's contemporaries, and to travel from layer to layer into their paintings is to know that we shall land finally on a sheet of canvas. To encounter Tobey and to make the same journey is to move farther and farther beyond the canvas into a state of experience where material, emotional, and intellectual forces combine into a kind of spiritual ecstasy that transcends any and all of these ingredients. Few artists in history have succeeded in this effort, but they are the great ones.

It does, of course, require effort and courage to move through the world of self and to enter that state of infinite selflessness which seems to me to be the most complete experience a human being is equipped to know. Perhaps other cultures have learned this through disillusionment with material security, but Americans seem not yet to have arrived at this understanding of ultimate values, for the most part. Hence even in the world of art, Tobey's ability to integrate all the factors of the human condition is less favored than the ability to explore one or the other of its components or to comment on irrelevant social or political problems. It may be for these reasons that Tobey's successes were largely European. Even after his becoming the first American artist since Whistler to be awarded the Grand International Prize of the 1958 Venice Biennale (without bribery, it must be emphasized) this news was scarcely mentioned in the New York art press. One well-known editor went so far as to say that since Tobey had abandoned New York, New York was no longer interested in him. What pathetic provincialism!—and it continues today!

I do not wish to imply, however, that he was unhonored totally in this country. The list of his exhibitions, both solo and group, as well as various prizes and awards in America as well as abroad, is long enough for any man. I merely wish to emphasize that his universality seems to have been too vast for inclusion in any one local scene, either municipal or national—or earthly, for that matter!

Born in 1890 in Centerville, Wisconsin, Tobey left the Middle West at twenty-one, to begin a series of moves and removes to various parts of the world: to New York, Seattle, England, Chicago, New York, Paris, Seattle, and finally Basel. He was obviously beyond possessing or being possessed by any one place. Nevertheless, it seems to me he carried with him everywhere those mid-western qualities of awesome geographic openness and spiritual innocence that many of us from that part of America know so well and feel so lucky to have grown up in. It gave to all of us, and certainly to Tobey in extraordinary degree, a most appropriate sense of space in this age of emphasis on the conquest of space and time. Yet it is somehow sadly amusing that Tobey, for all his flights into extraterrestrial spheres, distrusted the very appliances that could have taken him directly into physical experiences akin to his imagined flights. He is known to have taken an airplane only once in his life! He is known to have crossed the Atlantic by ship for a one-day appointment in New York and returned again by ship the next day. He always crossed America by train on his occasional trips from the East Coast to Seattle.

It would appear that his trust was internal, not external, and found its worldly support in the Baha’i faith which he embraced in 1918 and never abandoned. But this cryptic, universal religion never deprived him of a shrewdness about worldly matters. He was not hermitic; he was informed. His intuition about his fellow men was a mixture of acute perception and amoral compassion. Some reference to human form can be seen in many of his works, and seems to lurk just out of sight in all of them. He loved music, and like Feininger, did some composing and was an accomplished pianist.

Mark Tobey honored this organization by his membership since 1959. It will be a long time before a painter of his stature will grace our roster again.