In 1961, Mark Tobey, a Wisconsin-born, Basel-based painter became the first non-French artist ever to get a solo show at France’s prestigious Musée des Arts Décoratifs. It was “the one man show of the season,” wrote New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner. She quoted a critic in the Parisian magazine Preuves, who called Tobey “perhaps the most important painter of our epoch.”
A year later, William C. Seitz, a curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, organized a Tobey show in New York. In his forward to the show’s catalogue, Seitz classified Tobey as a precursor to the likes of Jackson Pollock. “At present,” he wrote, “it would appear Tobey is even more highly regarded abroad than he is at home.”
Nearly 60 years later, Pollock is still a household name. Tobey, who died in 1976, is rarely regarded at all.
He hasn’t had a solo museum exhibition in New York in more than 40 years, and major works by Tobey rarely come on the open market. “There haven’t been big museum shows or gallery shows,” says dealer Craig Starr. “Anyone who has great taste and sees his best work would want it, but it’s not available.”
Tobey’s reputation has begun to flicker back to life. Last year, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice held a retrospective of Tobey’s work, the first in Europe in nearly 20 years. It then traveled to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass. In June, one of his paintings sold for a record-breaking $1.6 million at Sotheby’s in Paris, double his previous auction record.
In October, Pace Gallery in New York opened a show of Tobey’s art that will run through Jan. 12. “It’s a very mysterious market, because things rarely come to auction,” says Joe Baptista, the Pace dealer who spent two years organizing the show. “But I’m hoping with the exhibition that beyond the market, we’re allowing people to get intimate with a large body of work and really get a sense of who Tobey is—and what his contribution is.”
International Prominence
Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisc., in 1890, and moved to New York in 1911. He worked as both an illustrator and an artist until 1922, at which point he moved to Seattle. By 1935, he’d developed his signature “white writing” style, which influential critic Clement Greenberg described as a “calligraphic, tightly meshed interlacing of white lines which build up to a vertical, rectangular mass reaching almost to the edges of the frame.”
It was the white writing style that made Tobey famous. Jackson Pollock saw it at New York’s Willard Gallery in 1944 and started his signature “drip” paintings a few years later.
By 1955, Tobey had reached what Seitz, the MoMA curator, called “international prominence.” In due course, Tobey moved to Basel, Switzerland, and lived in what the New York Times described as a “fortress-like old mansion.” When he died there in 1976, a Times obituary claimed that “by many, senior Europeans he was regarded as the greatest American painter since James McNeill Whistler.”
The same obituary noted that in Tobey’s later years, he was “blessed with an ideally sensitive secretary and companion,” a man named Mark Ritter who inherited the bulk of the art that was in Tobey’s Basel house at the time of his death. The rest of Tobey’s estate and papers were left to the Seattle Art Museum. (The museum didn’t respond to requests for comment.)