Mark Tobey the predecessor of Jackson Pollock.

Yesterday on a seriously rainy day I decided to go to the exhibition of Mark Tobey at the Thomas Williams Gallery in posh Old Bond Street in central London. It was my first time in the gallery which set on the first floor of the building, one had to ring a bell to get in. I did find the staff in the gallery friendly. Mark Tobey's work was well set up in one room. The work was mainly of a small scale: watercolours, tempera, mixed media from his late period the 1960's. I did find interesting the sizes of his work the variety of sizes especially for the watercolours which combined with the gentle use of colours in the work an air of intimacy, delicacy far remote from the stronger, vigorous work of Jackson Pollock. Yes because while I was observing Mark Tobey's work I noticed an 'all over 'painting style with no focal point, free of boundaries which later was central to Abstract Expressionism and the work of Jackson Pollock who was introduced to Tobey's work at the Willard Gallery in new York in 1944 but while Tobey's work is carefully constructed, calm & partly inspired by calligraphy Jackson Pollock's work was strong, the execution energetically almost violent and the scale of the work much bigger. Also I did find amusing that Mark Tobey's style actually came from the period he spent in England more specifically in 1931 at Dartington Hall in rural Devon owned by Leonard Elmhirst (who studied under the poet & social reformer Rabindranath Tagore) & his wife Dorothy, where he also met Henry Moore, Lucian Clement & Stephan Freud, Piet Mondrian. In 1935  while in Devon  Mark Tobey experienced an artistic breakthrough: he started a new way of painting called Broadway see below,

then was followed by Welcome Hero(1935) & a Broadway Norm(1935) in this last one there was no connection that could relate the painting to the title. In the exhibition  most  of his work did not have titles. For the first time in Broadway he used lines as a way to go beyond objects with a variety of combinations this was also present in the untitled works in the exhibition. One doesn't look at the lines to examine their intrinsic quality because they are freely combined  and unifying the object with the space around it in such away that you have to relate to the whole of the picture they are the first example of the 'bordeless'  picture or as Harold Rosenberg called them in 1952 ' an apocalyptic wallpaper'. One thing I always found curious about Mark Tobey is that he followed the Bahai faith so Tobey thought that each stroke of his brush maybe divinely directed I read some where that a portrait painter names Juliet Thompson introduced him to the Bahai' faith. Anyway one thing is for sure that from his work one can see that he was constantly searching for a freer way of painting, to be closer to nature and a strong influence of Chinese calligraphy. Chinese ink wash painting where also comes from the idea of a freely moving brush stroke he did actually travel to Shanghai in 1934 and then to Japan where he was not only absorbed by the culture, but he also discovered Japanese Zen Buddhism, Japanese ink painting and he studied Zen meditation in a Zen Buddhist monastery near Kyoto.

Most of the works in the exhibition are actually part of his late period: the 1960's where he was based in Basel Switzerland and are mainly watercolours, tempera & oil on paper with stronger colours, the use of red with a variety of forms and shapes from vertical brushstrokes Untitled 1964 to small dubs of painting Untiled 1970 in this period he also experimented with monotypes with no lines. I did find his work inspiring both in the concept, use of colours and the variety of sizes in his watercolours and the variety of types of paper he used which gave a completely different effect to his watercolours. I did find exciting that there where no figurative watercolours but they where all abstract and varied in their combinations it felt liberating after I have been to I don't how many figurative watercolour exhibitions in London. Below are the works of Mark Tobey which are on display at the Thomas Williams Gallery all untitled but from his later period the 1960's.