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Excerpts from the Correspondence of Tobey to Marian Willard
Mark Tobey. Retrospective, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris 1961
I have always felt that New York, your New York, was my major painting of the whole white-writing series and would think so ‘till Doomsday. Fortunately, I am not alone. The other paintings are varying attempts at a type of modern beauty I only find in the delicate structures of airplane beacons and electrical transformers and all that wonderful slender architecture connected with a current so potent and mysterious. On a hill outside Portland there is a nest of them in red and silver and something to see. Broadway, like New York, was an experience. This cannot happen very often and certainly not so much, being isolated as I am.
I can only seek parallels in Klee ... Picasso ... for any just excuse as it is still all in all an experimental time for many artists. (September, 1946)
About the time people want my maze of white-writing I won’t want to do them any more. Am painting as hard as I can but it’s terrific how little seems to appear after so much effort. (June, 1947)
Don’t know how much longer I can keep on white-writing as it’s too nervous a style - too exacting for a nervous man. (June, 1947)
Yesterday I sent the last painting called Day of the Martyr.
I know that martyr subjects aren’t popular but there it is and I believe I achieved what I wanted in space with content. Gothic though it may look, still one never saw this kind of space in the Gothic. (October, 1947)
I am glad Barr likes the Five Dancers. This was painted in the spirit of Zen - shouldn’t say method; that is, the doing and idea are |
