Observer » Mark Tobey

Tobey and Feininger, Epistolary Buddies In the Avant-Garde

Hilton Kramer — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The current exhibition at Achim Moeller Fine Art- Lyonel Feininger/Mark Tobey: Years of Friendship, 1944-1956 -brings together the work of two American modernists who, although very different in background, temperament and style, enjoyed a friendship that's said to have been important to both. Feininger (1871-1956), born in New York to a German-American family whose interests were mainly musical, was a far more cosmopolitan figure than the younger and more reclusive Tobey (1890-1976), who, as a convert to the Bahai faith, brought a more mystical sensibility to his art. They met in New York in 1944, when both were exhibiting their work at the Willard Gallery, then one of the principal venues of the emerging American avant-garde.

Theirs was mainly an epistolary friendship, for they lived and worked at opposite ends of the country-Feininger in New York (when he wasn't in Europe) and Tobey in Seattle (when he wasn't traveling in the Far East). They met only three times over the course of a dozen years. Whether, or to what extent, they influenced each other's work is likely to remain unknown until the publication of their correspondence, which is said to have been extensive. Achim Moeller Fine Art has promised publication for the spring of 2005.

Their respective artistic accomplishments are similarly far apart. Tobey is mainly admired today for a mode of intimist abstraction that has been dubbed "white writing": Minute white calligraphic forms are superimposed upon dreamlike allusions to vaguely identifiable backgrounds. In the current selection of his work, however, there are a number of paintings that could more accurately be characterized as "black writing"- Market in Summer (1958), for example, or Sumi (Abstract) (1957). Except for their modest scale, they could invite comparisons with Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline-and yet it would be a mistake to suggest that Tobey was directly influenced by the New York School. In his abstractions, there's a finicky concentration on minute particulars that's very different from the brash energy and improvisation that characterized the Abstract Expressionists.

Feininger's career encompassed a far greater range of interests. He was still a young artist working in Europe when he enjoyed an immense success as a political cartoonist in Germany (although he was living most of the time in Paris), and this led to an invitation to produce comic strips for the Chicago Sunday Tribune , which assured his financial independence at an early age. It was in Paris that he encountered the modernist movement for the first time, and found in the Cubism of Braque, Picasso and Gris the pictorial syntax that served as the foundation for all his subsequent accomplishments. (For a brief period, Feininger worked as a cartoonist for the French journal Le Témoin at the same time as Gris, though there's no evidence to suggest that they were friends.)

Even in his initial endeavors as a modernist, Feininger's version of Cubism was markedly different from the style practiced by his Parisian contemporaries. Feininger himself described it as "visionary" Cubism, and behind the designation lay not only his enthusiasm for Turner and Whistler-and thus for light as his primary subject-but also something of his graphic gifts as well.

Feininger's early critics spoke of the prismatic or "crystalline" quality of his pictures, and the characteristic works of his maturity were, in fact, a kind of transmutation of this romantic preoccupation with light and atmosphere. Never a strong colorist, Feininger was nonetheless able to bring his graphic powers to bear on the construction of monumental prisms of light-symbols, in his own imagination, of a simpler and more spiritual world than any to be seen with the naked eye.

These symbols all retained a recognizable relation to the observable world, however. Feininger was not, in the sense that other Cubists were, an abstract artist. Both landscape and urban motifs abound in his work, as we can see in the current show, but they all tend to represent a pure country of the mind. In Feininger's vision, the objects of modern experience are exquisitely dissolved in an unearthly light and refracted into a form of visual pastoral that harks back to the innocent emotions of his youth. His was thus a pictorial style that gave him exactly what he needed to transcend the limits of his graphic talent and address his art to what he liked to call "cosmic wonders"-which is where Feininger and Tobey found common ground.

It's to be hoped that sometime in the near future, we shall have an opportunity to see large-scale solo exhibitions devoted to each of these artists. Lyonel Feininger/Mark Tobey: Years of Friendship, 1944-1956 doesn't pretend to satisfy an interest in either, but it does have the virtue of offering the public an introduction to their work. The exhibition remains on view at Achim Moeller Fine Art, 167 East 73rd Street, through Nov. 22.

Mystic Morris Graves: His Birds, Flowers Have Painterly Weight

Hilton Kramer — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Back in the 1950's, when the Paris art world was rudely awakened to the existence of the Abstract Expressionist painters in New York, some French art critics claimed to have discovered a group of expatriate American painters in Europe whom they promptly dubbed the Ecole du Pacifique -presumably to distinguish them from the ascendant New York School. Whether such an école ever existed is doubtful, for only three artists are cited as belonging to it: Sam Francis (1923-1994), who hailed from San Francisco, together with Mark Tobey (1890-1976) and Morris Graves (1910-2001), both of whom had connections with Seattle. (Occasionally, you might find Jackson Pollock's name added to the list-he spent some time in Los Angeles as a teenager before coming to New York to study with Thomas Hart Benton). But it never really mattered whether an Ecole du Pacifique existed. The name itself was sufficient for French critics desperate to find something both American and abstract happening on their side of the Atlantic-something to play off against the looming threat of New York School abstraction.

At the time, Sam Francis was better known in Paris, where he was living, than in New York; and Mark Tobey, who eventually settled in Basel, Switzerland, became something of a cult figure in Europe. But Morris Graves? Although influenced in certain of his works by Tobey's "white writing" abstractions, Graves was not himself an abstract painter, and his representational paintings and drawings are so emphatically personal in spirit and style that the very idea of enlisting him in someone else's "school" or movement makes no sense whatsoever. I hasten to add, however, that this hasn't prevented writers in some currently available art-reference books from continuing to include Graves in this mythical Pacific school. He wasn't even an expatriate, though he was an energetic traveler, especially to the Far East, where he encountered mystical religious traditions and aesthetic conventions he adopted as his own.

Morris Graves: Symbols and Reality , an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, is the first we've seen since the artist's death two and a half years ago. Though it isn't the museum retrospective that's overdue for a painter of Graves' distinction, this show does give us a more vivid account of the range of his work than any we have seen in some time. The expected images of birds and flowers are amply represented, and so are the delicate washes of color on Chinese and other beautifully made paper grounds that we commonly associate with Graves' art.

What comes as a surprise-for this viewer, anyway-is the sheer boldness and painterly weight of certain pictures. Expressionist facture is about the last thing we think to look for in Graves' paintings, yet in an early picture like Sunflower (1935), we're given a darker, more autumnal version of van Gogh's most famous subject, and there's a similar venture into macabre Expressionism in a canvas called Sidewalk Drinking Fountain (1934-35). In a later picture, too- Winter Still Life #3 (Hellebore) (1983)-the dramatic contrast between the darkened background and the brilliant light of the poisonous hellebore blossoms is positively eerie. Even more unsettling are the monumental tulips against a stark black background in the painting called Triumph (1955). Fairly eerie, too, is the early Snake and Moon (1938), one of the earliest of Graves' black paintings-which are among his best.

These black paintings clearly had a special, perhaps mystical meaning for the artist, as we are reminded in Peter Selz's very moving memoir in the exhibition's catalog. In a passage devoted to Graves' still-life pictures, Mr. Selz singles out Triumph for the place it occupied in Graves' life-and death, too: "Against a black background the flowers, in various stages of unfolding, are stretching toward the light. He named this painting Triumph and always kept it close to himself; he had it brought into his bedroom as he was reaching the end of his life."

Compared to the unexpected audacities of the black paintings, some of Graves' bird pictures are fairly low-key. The only one that is as weighty in expression as the black paintings is Gander Ready for Flight (1952), in which the outsize image of the bird seems ready to fly out of the canvas.

Elsewhere in his images of birds, Graves slipped into sentimentality. But it may be that I lack the requisite taste for mystical experience that Graves brought to his depiction of birds-fond as I am of these beautiful creatures, to me they signify nothing in the way of metaphysical illumination. Graves' botanical subjects, especially the flowers, invariably strike a far deeper note of pictorial expression.

It is to be hoped that some time before 2010-the centenary of Graves' birth-we shall see a major retrospective of his oeuvre . Meanwhile, Morris Graves: Symbols and Reality remains on view at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, through Jan. 3, 2004.