Mark Tobey

Untitled Sumi

Tobey was an artistic alchemist who never settled on a single approach to picture making. In the spring of 1957, he put himself through intensive training in Japanese Sumi techniques, using opaque black ink thrown and splashed in a controlled way onto paper. His teacher, the Zen master Takizaki, told Tobey, "Let nature take over in your work" and he came to the realization that "State of Mind is the first preparation and from this action proceeds". From this teaching came a heightened sense of mental clarity; what Tobey claimed was "perhaps the ideal state to be sought for in the painting and certainly preparatory to the act". Tobey described the creation of the Sumi works, of which he could paint up to 30 in one evening, as "a kind of fever, like the earth in spring or a hurricane [...] I could say I painted the Sumis to experience a heightened sense of living". If he liked the finished work he would sign it, if not, he would just tear up the painting and throw it away.

With his spontaneous Sumi works, Tobey had upended the painstaking deliberation of his white writing. The tradition offered the artist another form of expression that could be brought into the modernist canon. After he had produced more than 100 such paintings, he informed his New York gallery that he wanted "an all black and white show [...] Takizaki here says no one in Japan has done what I have done. I know that Kline exists and Pollock, but I have another note". Art historian Debra Bricker Balken has written, "Tobey may have wanted to investigate the spirited skeins of paint and predominantly black color scheme that Pollock had utilized, through the intermediary of Japanese convention. But action painting was never Tobey's goal, its emphasis on the existential plight of the artist a part of neither his aesthetic approach nor his mind-set".

Seitz had observed that Tobey preferred the Japanese aesthetic to the Chinese, and placed great value the idea of shibui: "that which doesn't look like anything, but in time discloses its jewels". He had embraced the idea of chance and the freedom of the "flung" style, which he employed through his sumi series. Tobey was committed to the "idea that forms could migrate from Orient to Occident just as they previously had in the opposite direction". Indeed, for Tobey, Bahá'í and Zen remained his two most important spiritual influences but, he said, Bahá'í "found him," whereas it was he who sought out and found Zen. "I could never be anything," he finally conceded, "but the occidental I am".