Page 14 - Studio International - October1973

Chinese brush. Ten years later he stayed with Oriental art had been called into being to evoke. Outmoderned
Teng K'uei in Shanghai, then moved on to Tobey indeed seems to be a classic illustration
Japan, where he spent a month in a Zen of one of the main themes of this book, discussed Dore Ashton
monastery, painting and practising calligraphy, in the last chapter — namely, that artistic
• and trying to meditate. Like the fourth-century influence is really fruitful only when the artist,
Chinese landscape painter Tsung Ping, he or indeed the culture, that absorbs it feels a
found that he was not very good at meditating, conscious or unconscious need for what if offers
but, like Tsung Ping, he felt that the act of and can at once put it to use.
holding the brush gave him the same feeling of There is not enough space in this book to do
1120 spiritual release. justice to the Oriental influence on contemporary
Tobey's experience in Japan left him feeling American painting, but I should at least
very much an Occidental — or so he thought. But mention William Barker, whose 1-ching series
I of oil paintings was inspired by the Shang
after he had returned to England in1935, one
autumn evening in his studio in Dartington oracle bones (as was Zao Wou-ki in one phase
Hall he began to weave on paper an endless web of his career), and Ulfert Wilke, an exponent of
of white lines on a brown ground. When he had abstract calligraphy who spent a year in Japan,
I part of it in a Zen temple. Both Stanton
finished the result did not look to him in the
least Oriental; it looked like Broadway. But as MacDonald-Wright and Ad Reinhardt have
he later remembered this climactic experience, made a serious study of Chinese painting the
of its own accord, he said, 'the calligraphic former has been a Professor of Oriental Art —
impulse I had received in China enabled me to but no Oriental influence can be seen in their
convey, without being bound by forms, the own painting.
notion of the people and the cars and the whole The work of Morris Graves, another Seattle
vitality of the scene.' The scales fell away. In a painter, may seem at first sight more Oriental
sudden flash, without being aware of what was than Tobey's. For not only did he borrow
happening, he had broken through the Western Tobey's 'white writing', but the subjects of
conventions of pictorial space into a new world. some of his most striking pictures are taken
It is often said that what is Oriental about from the Chinese ritual bronzes in the Seattle
Tobey's famous 'white writing' pictures is their Art Museum. He is a profound admirer of
calligraphic quality. But his line, endlessly Tobey and a student of Zen, he visited the
moving or agitated in jerky rhythms though it Orient, and creates around himself a thoroughly
may be, is never in these paintings really Japanese ambience. But his work is very
calligraphic; unlike the line in Oriental different. While in Tobey's paintings forms
calligraphy, it cannot be pulled out of the dissolve into space, Graves's archaic bronzes and
picture to stand as an expressive form on its wounded gulls loom out of the night, bathed in
own. Rather is it a means to an end — namely, an unearthly luminosity, as if possessed by some
magic, animating force. Space is not the subject
the evocation of a feeling of continuous space,
which became for Tobey 'a kind of living thing — of his pictures, but only the matrix out of which
like a sixth sense'. The line, as he put it, brings the forms become manifest with a dream-like Repeat a word often enough as any child knows
I clarity. A parallel has been drawn between his and it loses its meaning. Or it produces visions.
about 'the dematerialization of form by space
penetration'; it is, in other words, descriptive birds and those painted by the Chinese It is hard to tell which result predominates
rather than expressive. Much later, in 1957, seventeenth-century eccentric Pa-ta Shan-jen, when it comes to the word modernism. It has
Tobey experimented briefly with pure which have something of the same compelling been repeated so often that even its origin in the
calligraphic ink gestures, but while these power. But while Graves's birds dwell in a word 'mode' has been encrusted with alternate
pictures are obviously Oriental in appearance, twilight world, Pa-ta's birds belong to the day. meanings. As a word, it is an old armadillo,
they are less deeply Oriental in feeling than They may sometimes look bad-tempered, but stiff, inflexible and well insulated against the
those miraculous hints of a world beyond time never are they, like Graves's, threatening, onslaught of the living. In art criticism, the
and space revealed in the most lyrically abstract wounded, blind, or dead. Such a view of nature ubiquity of this concept — call it modernism or
of his 'white writing' pictures. In the 195os a would be unthinkable to a Chinese painter. even modernity has culminated in a situation,
number of artists, such as Pollock, Dubuffet, • Morris Graves said of his Wounded Gull that dear to academics, in which the works upon
Michaux and Cuppa, arrived at a similar type of `the dying image will soon be one with the vast, which such a concept once depended no longer
all-over composition composed of endlessly infinite forms of the ocean and the sky around figure. The discussion of any 'ism', but
moving lines, or dots, or agitated vermicular it', and felt that this was a Zen idea. But in Zen especially modernism, always leads away from
forms, that seem to extend beyond the picture the union of the spirit with eternity is attained the work. Scholasticism and modeinism have
space; but only in Tobey's is there a direct link not by the dissolution of the physical body but too much in common.
with Oriental art. the conscious mind. It is an ecstatic thing, and Any individual pronouncing the sacred
Yet even in Tobey's case we are no longer on Zen art above all is an art of release and joy. An category is sui generis a modern man. Tradition
firm ground, and such terms as 'Oriental in American critic wrote of Graves's tortured Owl has handed us our vision — scarcely altered for
appearance' tell us more about our own of the Inner Eye, `Vainly [my italics] it attempts, almost two centuries of the modern man. He
through its outer calm and inner intensity, to is Dostoyevsky groaning, 'What does reason
ignorance than about the picture itself. For
Tobey's declared aim was to express an unite itself with the void and attain Satori.' No know ? Reason onlyknows what it has succeeded
essentially American experience — 'the frenetic Zen painter would depict the spiritual agony in finding out . but man's nature acts as one.
rhythms of the modern city, the interweaving of and loneliness of a being unable to find union whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or
streams of lights and streams of people who are with God. In spite of his Oriental themes and unconscious, and although it is nonsensical, yet
entangled in the meshes of this net' — something occasional Oriental techniques, Graves's it lives'. He is Mallarmé, beginning so many
utterly remote from the kind of visual character. sentences with a resounding Rien and finishing
mysticism seems somewhat Western in
experience that the calligraphic rhythms of never with his Nothingness. And Sartre after
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