Mark Tobey’s Sharp Field, 1960, currently on view at the Pace Gallery in New York.
Photographer: Tom Barratt, courtesy Pace Gallery © 2018 Mark Tobey/Seattle Art Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Inside the Spectacular Rise and Fall of an Artist’s Legacy
When Mark Tobey died, his estate was left without an advocate. His market is just beginning to recover.
In 1961, Mark Tobey, a Wisconsin-born, Basel-based painter became the first non-French artist ever to get a solo show at France’s prestigious Musée des Arts Décoratifs. It was “the one man show of the season,” wrote New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner. She quoted a critic in the Parisian magazine Preuves, who called Tobey “perhaps the most important painter of our epoch.”
A year later, William C. Seitz, a curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, organized a Tobey show in New York. In his forward to the show’s catalogue, Seitz classified Tobey as a precursor to the likes of Jackson Pollock. “At present,” he wrote, “it would appear Tobey is even more highly regarded abroad than he is at home.”