We are all waves on the same sea

As unfathomable as love and its reasons may be – whoever declares his love declares something about himself. Arnold Stadler undertakes a “declaration of love” in both senses of the word, and he succeeds in creating a double portrait.

In 1976, when he had just escaped from the seminary in Rome to go to the University of Freiburg, Stadler fell in love with the pictorial world of the American painter Mark Tobey. Here the word “fucked” would really be inappropriate, because this eye-opening love at first sight met an object worthy of the greatest admiration and deep affection.

“Glowing Fall” was the name of this radiant work, which Stadler fell in love with a few months after the death of the artist, who had lived in Basel since 1960. In it, Tobey had glowing autumnal umber and gold ocher tones supported by marginal areas of luminous azure and graphically prominently overplayed by linear gestures in black.

cracking of surfaces

The aesthetic experience of fullness of light, of the simultaneity of past and present movement, could be made there. Tobey sets a dynamic into the open, the beauty of the reconciliation of the spheres, shimmering, joyful affirmation of life. And vulnerability, the tearing of surfaces, the delicate veins beneath thin skin. Stadler repeatedly had such horizon- and emotion-expanding visual experiences in front of Tobey’s works, including as a frequent guest at the home of his gallery owners Ernst and Hildy Beyeler in Basel.

From then on, the writer’s line of life intertwined with that of the painter. Stadler lets these lines cross over time when he travels from Tobey’s birthplace Centerville to Trempealeau and, with a view of the Mississippi, thinks about his and Tobey’s early childhood imprint through impressions of nature, barefoot childhoods in the country. There he begins to trace what Tobey’s life motto could have been: “We are all waves of the same sea, we are all waves to the same sea”.

This conviction underlies the artist’s devotion to his linear visual language, which constantly flows through many transformations.

Stadler follows Tobey to Seattle, where he kept a second studio until the end of his life. And he finds parallels: both were drawn longingly, curiously, far and wide, meandering restlessly into the world – Tobey, among other things, to the Near East, in 1934 to China and Japan, where he received his “calligraphic impulse” and spent months in a Zen monastery . Stadler, who has traveled no less, not only raves about Mark to his friend Jim in Miami, completely ineffectively, but also to two American women from Seattle on Kilimanjaro, trying to win them over to his art – an amusing account of a love’s effort completely lost.

renunciation of theory

Tobey had no theory, Stadler knows, and feels related to him. Stadler calls himself an artist like Tobey, a “painter” who empathically speculates and puts himself in his life and work. And he does it with verve, flair and sensitivity.

Finally, Stadler visits the St. Alban suburb in Basel. Suddenly the images are the same. The Mississippi and the knee of the Rhine in close proximity to house number 69, where, to Stadler’s chagrin, there isn’t even a plaque indicating the former resident.

He thinks about Tobey’s life people and companions, Mark Ritter and Pehr Hallsten, the friend and neighboring pastor Paul Hassler, how they walked through this street and how people live here today, love and betray one another.

Tobey’s rank is historically undisputed. As early as 1966, Wieland Schmied recognized that he, who had received the Venice Biennale prize in 1958 instead of Mark Rothko, was quietly recreating the history of painting long before Jackson Pollock with his “White Writings” – drawn softly into the water and yet imperishable had written. His all-over scripts began in 1935. With them, the artist, who had adopted the Baha’i religion in 1918, delicately interwoven his feeling for the energetic oneness of all life with the perception of the vibrant dynamics of a modern city like New York.

compositional hierarchy

It was not until 1943 that Pollock threw comparable abstracts expressively with great gesture into the gigantic format and, moreover, had seen Tobey’s works beforehand, which his influential apologist Clement Greenberg wisely concealed. By then Tobey had long since freed the picture from the dictates of the compositional hierarchy, the construction of spatial illusions and the focus on the centre. Where Pollock danced, Tobey meditated.

For Stadler, the fact that his pioneering work was not rated as highly until well into the 1960s is due to Greenberg’s resentment of Tobey’s homosexuality and his fixation on the image of virile artist heroes.

The critic therefore relegated Tobey to the second row. Pollock’s “action painting” shows the body ecstatically, while Tobey’s poetic line art shows the spirit in motion, striving for clarity. This, too, makes his concentrated works deep, echoing that inner space which, by his own admission, he sought to form contemplatively, for Stadler mysterious, not enigmatic.

Tobey himself never understood his art as abstract. On the contrary, for him it was copied from life and nature and turned to it. His subtle weaves are inspired by a close-up look at the overlooked, the subsurface, the barely perceptible structure, the vital flow in everything. And by looking into space, into the wonderful expanse – and back.

What Stadler detects in Tobey is a consonance in cheerful and thoughtful moments. We love, you can read that on every page here, what makes us happy. This double portrait of two romantics is painted as densely and transparently as a picture by Mark Tobey, a happy success.