Art: Honest Prophet

At 69, Mark Tobey is the oldest living prophet of abstract expressionism, but Tobey opposes isms in general, and remains chronically unsure of what he himself is doing. Yet last year he took the Grand Prize at the Venice biennial, the first American painter so honored since James McNeill Whistler. And last week a major Tobey retrospective show, mounted by the Seattle Art Museum, was delighting Portland, Ore. on the second lap of a tour that will include Colorado Springs, Pasadena and San Francisco. Leaning on the piano in his drab Seattle house, the reluctant lion huffed that he himself had not selected the show, implied that he would have thrown out some of it.

Take a Wide Brush. About TIME’S selections from the exhibition (opposite), Tobey was blunt. White Night he called “pretty good for 1942. But . . .” Market Place cheered him somewhat: “It’s a combination of figuration and white writing. All right for the time. If this place [Seattle’s Pike Street Market] were not there, you wouldn’t see people in such a rich way, humanly speaking.” But Tobey’s recent untitled picture brought an outburst from the artist: “Look, this is an easy painting to do. I’ll bet I could paint seven of them a day. You just take a wide brush and go like this and that.”

Since the voice of the parrot is so commonly heard in the studio, Tobey’s raven croaks are refreshing to hear. All is not beautiful, apparently, beyond the cellophane curtain of abstract art. There, too, error and failure struggle with truth and rare success. “I’m not a man with a lot of ideas,” Tobey admits. “I’m searching, searching, searching.” Has he ever found what he was looking for? “No,” Tobey says. “Sometimes you think you’ve found it. Then you have to be careful because you might become selfconscious, and when you do, you haven’t got much.”

Lasso, Come Home. Tobey’s search has led him far and wide from the little town of Trempealeau, Wis., where he spent his boyhood. He began as a fashion artist, graduated to society portraits. Then, fed up with New York dinner parties, he began wandering—to England, Mexico, the Middle East and the Orient. Seattle became his home base, but China was where he learned most. There he began what he calls “white writing,” a sort of spider web or gossamer lasso of paint intended to entrap forms in motion. He came back from China proclaiming: “I used to paint shapes, now I write lines. Whenever I look at an object, I see racing lines. When I look at a tree, it becomes a flame of rhythm bursting out of the ground. I don’t see a telephone, but the loop of the cord and its surge of vitality as it reaches the phone.”

Over the years Tobey’s lines and smudges have taken on a ghostly life of their own. From these modest roots sprang Pollock, De Kooning, Mathieu, Appel and the other dragon-seed men of abstract expressionism.

Such men have created an exciting period in art, but, Tobey points out, it is also a difficult time for the artist. “I believe we should have a new language but also communication. Of course, an artist has to paint what he can. If he has to wait until some other time for communication, then he has to wait. I have more technique than I used to have years ago, but that doesn’t guarantee that I can do anything with it. Technique is a corpse.”