Mark Tobey - Influence

Influence

Helmi Juvonen, another Northwest School artist, was obsessed with Tobey. She was diagnosed as a manic depressive, and suffered the delusion that she and Tobey were man and wife, a point of misinformation which she shared with almost anyone.

Tobey's friend Elizabeth Bayley Willis showed Tobey's painting Bars and Flails to Jackson Pollock in 1944. Pollock studied the painting closely and then painted Blue Poles, a painting that made history when the Australian government bought it for $2 million. Pollock's biographers write: "... dense web of white strokes, as elegant as Oriental calligraphy, impressed Jackson so much that in a letter to Louis Bunce he described Tobey, a West Coast artist, as an 'exception' to the rule that New York was 'the only real place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru'" (Jackson Pollock). Jackson Pollock went to all of Mark Tobey's Willard Gallery shows in New York. Here, Tobey presented small to medium sized canvases, approximately 33 by 45 inches. Jackson Pollock would see them and go home and blow them up to twelve by nine feet, pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on. Pollock was never really concerned with diffused light. But he was very interested in Tobey's idea of covering the entire canvas with marks up to and including its edges. This had never been done before in American art.