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Lyonel Feininger, letter to Mark Tobey from December 2nd 1950, in:
Feininger and Tobey. Years of Friendship 1944-1956. The Complete Correspondence, Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York 1991
And now, dear Mark, we saw your latest work, showing chiefly linear expression, which has always been the vehicle of your especial gift: that of calligraphy. We reacted at once strongly and happily to your delineations of aerial presentation of vast terrestrial expanses as experienced optically, imaginatively, from great heights. We feel that with one great stride you have achieved a spatial vision which is at once satisfactory and at the same time convincingly logical, and which I should place far and away beyond anything I have knowledge of by contemporary painters. At the same time, they are breath-takingly expressive and beautiful. Man dear! I wish you joy of this years work. I know of no comparison, excepting with your own previous stages of development leading to this last manifestation. Although in its way each drawing is happy, I might mention a few which struck a deep resonance, chiefly the unicolor line drawings, in my receptive spirit. I mention The Aerial City, Canal of Cultures, - a beauty that! - Tattowed Space, Nomadia, Destillation of Myth, Mists of History, and Indian Country - this one entirely different. (p. 75/76)
Julia and Lyonel Feininger, in: Mark Tobey, Willard Gallery, New York 1945
Mark Tobey’s pictures are not optical in the traditional sense of paintings; they do not catch the eye through vivid color. Tobey himself speaks of his latest works as „white writing“, but it is the handwriting of the painter, a painter who, for the tales he has to tell in his pictures, has created a new convention of his own, one not yet included in the history of painting. Though there may arise in the mind of the beholder associations of ideas with hieroglyphs, runes, or the script in Chinese paintings, there is no relationship whatever, for it is a completely different spirituality which dominates Tobey’s work. His highly sensitive technique captures something of the fleeting values of our life; it is an expression adequate for times like ours, where old-accustomed stability has given way to changed |
