Seattle Tangler

Mark Tobey,* one of the Northwest's strangest and most famed painters, last week got the top recognition of his 60 years: San Francisco staged a big retrospective show in his honor. The pictures on exhibit dated back to 1917, when Tobey was painting reasonably realistic and somewhat prosaic still lifes and portraits. Since then, he has taken to reducing scenes and figures to luminous scribbles and to producing out & out abstractions--loose, slippery tangles of white lines that look as if they might have been inspired by a dish of spaghetti.

The exhibition catalogue quoted Tobey as explaining that "multiple space bounded by involved white lines symbolize higher states of consciousness."

Bare Feet. When he was in short pants, and presumably a lower state of consciousness, Tobey lived in the village of Trempealeau, Wis., on the banks of the Mississippi ("I was strictly the barefoot boy--hunting, fishing and flowers"). In adolescence he painstakingly copied Satevepost covers, and "thought the American girl was the most beautiful thing you could put on canvas."

That conviction, and some skill gained from copying, led to a job in Chicago sketching fashion figures for mail-order catalogues. A footloose fellow, he soon moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, sketched red chalk portraits at $200 each. Portraiture involved "too damned many dinner parties," so Tobey switched to painting lamps and screens for a while. In 1923 he trekked West to Seattle, has lived in the Northwest off & on ever since. Painting sales plus stints of art teaching earn him enough money to live simply and make occasional trips.

Paint-Splashed Shoes. One such trip, to China in 1934, revolutionized Tobey's art. He studied Chinese calligraphy, came home convinced that the barriers between Orient and Occident needed leveling, and that he could help by interpreting the Western world in scrambled calligraphs of his own invention. They made his name, started a fad for snarled, sloppy-looking abstractions that is still going strong. Such younger Seattle painters as Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan sat at his feet for a spell, and Manhattanites Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning may well have been influenced by his exhibitions.

Tobey's paintings appeal primarily to a tight circle of cognoscenti, but the man himself perfectly fills the popular picture of an artist. His leonine head is half snowed under by his untidy white hair; he drapes his bulky frame in handsome Harris tweeds, wears a carelessly slung scarf and paint-splashed shoes. Sympathetic or not, questions about his art generally draw an amiable response. "I can't understand doctors or lawyers," he says. "Why the hell should anyone understand me?"

* No kin to Senator Tobey of New Hampshire.

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