Page 29 - Studio International - March 1967

Mark Tobey
From the 'Meditative series' 1954
Tempera on paper
15+x 10 in.
Coll.: Galerie Beyeler, Basel

the end of the last century when Impressionists such as larger entities that the texture builds up.
Signac and Manet used somewhat similar methods. How- I do not know how much conscious attention Dubuffet
ever, they used them for a quite different purpose. The and Tobey have given to the sort of images they would
small spots of paint were not treated as important in find in scientific books or even in the scientific popular
themselves but only as a method for representing a macro- journals. Probably some. Tobey for instance has remarked
scopic visual effect. The picture as a whole looked like a `Scientists say ... there is no such thing as empty space.
piece of scenery or a building. Representation of a large It's all loaded with life. We know it to be teeming with
scale scene is an almost vanishingly small element in Tobey, electrical energy, potential sights, and silent sounds,
although some sort of ghostly and evanescent presence spores, seeds, and God knows what all.' But even if they
of buildings does sometimes seem to haunt the scene. had not noticed as much as that, the way in which the
The Dubuffet can, it is true, be regarded as a representa- story of the all-round view weaves back and forth between
tional picture if one wishes to—but what it represents, science and painting shows that the Two Culture Divide
perhaps an area of soil, is itself a scene on a minute scale supposed to separate science from literature is by no
involving a vast number of separate grains so that it is means such a barrier between science and the visual
still the all-over texture that is important and not some arts. q