Years of Friendship, 1944-1956: The Correspondence of Lyonel Feininger and Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey [in Julia Feininger’s hand]

 

Houghton bMS Ger 146.1 (2877)

 

May 12, 1944

Imagine being offered the bed of a master. I had such a lovely time with them—he will always live within me as the pure example of a man who has only to be felt—and the feeling or atmosphere is stronger than words—it is life itself which one gets from him—life which has been distilled and radiates as pure spirit—

Mark wrote this May 12, 1944

To Lyonel and Julia Feininger

 

Houghton bMS Ger 146 (1421)

ALS 21/2 pp.

 

November [1944]

41441/2 University Way
Seattle, Washington

Sunday

Dear Lyonel and Julia!

What a long silence on my part and yet you have been with me almost every day and there has been much communion of spirits. Life has been hectic and much, too much activity on the objective plane to suit me. This combined with eye-ulcers has kept me hopping.

Well I hear your show is up.1 How I wish I were there to see it and meet you once again. I saw your “Bird Cloud” (see ill. ?) in the Romantic show in San Francisco and felt it was the only “resolved” painting in the show.2 There was more sea in three inches of sand in your painting than all of ­[Marsden] Hartley’s canvases of the Maine Coast.3 If Hartley was so formal in pattern as to be completely empty of the vastness or force of the sea. I went to San Francisco for dental work in exchange for a painting. Walked in to the dentist’s office and there was a reproduction of a Feininger. She said that your show there some time ago had almost “knocked her out!”4 Also that a man came in for dental work and when he saw the Feininger said that was all the qualification he wanted as to her worth.

Well I’m trying now to get down to painting and your spirit Lyonel is all about me. My line shall grow more form and content too I hope since knowing you. No doubt there will be influence too but that’s the way it should be, for each plane of being has its own specific unity.

I am hoping and planning as much as one can in these days to arrange my affairs to come out and work. Feel that this winter will be enough. It’s too deadly here for real and concentrated art activity. Then too the town is too strident and for the most part feels like a file au rebours! Too much effort about Art and people.

Again your show! Certainly hope that the return will be satisfactory both in recognition and financial. Who says artists can’t use money!

Well if it takes a long time before I can actually be with you two again—please know that I am very often sitting in your living room and very happy to be there—in that world where these damned distractions are nil.

Always enjoying the paintings you gave me, watching the beautiful ship sailing away and almost running from the “Storm Cloud” [same as “Bird Cloud”].

Would certainly like to hear from you if you will forgive my long silence.

Happiness and health to you both.

Love
Mark

41441/2 University Way
Seattle, Washington

Excuse studio paper

1 “Lyonel Feininger/Marsden Hartley,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 24, 1944–January 14, 1945. This exhibition was important in bringing Feininger recognition as an American painter. Alfred H. Barr Jr. had failed to do this for him with “Paintings by 19 Living Americans,” in 1929, because public and critics considered Feininger a German artist at the time.

2 Bird Cloud (1926), o/c, Hess 268, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Mass. (since 1950). “Romantic Painting in America,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 17, 1943– February 6, 1944, which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Art and other venues. Also included were Flow of the Night (1943), tempera on board, by Tobey, and four works by Morris Graves, the latter purchased by the museum.

3 Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), American modernist painter and writer. Hartley and Feininger met and became friendly as early as 1912, when both were living in Berlin. Tobey met ­Hartley as early as 1920, and Hartley became an enthusiastic supporter of the younger artist’s work. Tobey had a solo show at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York, ­February 17–March 18, 1931, for which Hartley wrote the catalogue introduction. The Feininger exhibition was likely one of two exhibitions organized by the Mills College Art Gallery, ­Oakland, Calif. The exhibitions later traveled to San Francisco. The first exhibition was “Lyonel Feininger,” San Francisco Museum of Art, War Memorial, Civic Center, August 23–September 15, 1936. The second was “Second Feininger ­Exhibition: 35 New Paintings, 130 Drawings and Prints by Lyonel Feininger,” Museum of Art, San Francisco, or California Palace of the Legion of Honor, fall 1937.

4 “Lyonel Feininger,” Buchholz Gallery, New York, April 11–29, 1950 (oils and watercolors, 1948–49).

To Mark Tobey

 

Mark Tobey Papers 3593–2

TLS 22/3 pp. (Lyonel)

ALS 2/3 p. (Julia)

woodcuts used as letterhead: Prasse W261 Church with
Star (1928) and Prasse W264 Church with Six Stars (1928)

Illustrated on pages 229–231

 

December 29, 1944

235 East 22nd St.

New York City

New York 10, Dec. 29th, 1944

Dear Mark:

You are not the only one to keep silent communion; the more one thinks, I find the less I am able to get down to mere writing, but the war has atrophied my readiness to break forth into words.

We were glad to get your letter and it was well worth the waiting for. We gather that you have been working and that is good news. And yesterday evening we heard that you are exhibiting at the Willard Gallery in April.1 We are waiting for you; we want you to come here to the East, which is in all this vast continent the only true battle-ground for the artist. The day we learn that you have made your decision to come here will be the best news of all to us.

In your letter you mentioned having seen the “Bird Cloud.” I was glad that you saw and liked it.

We, Julia and I, were yesterday with Mrs. [Elizabeth Bayley] Willis2 and Mrs. Daves in the Museum [of Modern Art] to see my show [Feininger–Hartley], and later we all had dinner together in a pleasant French restaurant on West 56th Street, during which your name kept cropping up. Gosh, this all made me wish that we could meet before the show closes, which it is scheduled to do on January 14th. But I am told that it may be on circuit for more than a year, and will probably get to the West Coast with time.3 I have had the rare experience of seeing the work of a lifetime finely arranged in chronological order and clearly hung on walls suited to showing its quality to advantage—beautiful artificial lighting which seems to agree with my type of painting—and, as I was going to say, this retrospect stares the artist in the eye with final­ity. In no other walk of creative life, is this so entirely possible as with the work of the maker of pictures.

Impressionable as I am, this fact means a spiritual catching of one’s breath for a spell. I am now only wanting the show to leave the walls, so that I can begin to tick again. And if I had not a long row of new urges, and the strongest desire to correct errors before it gets too late to make good, the whole business of painting further would not be worth a brush-full of paint. This feeling I have with regard to oils. My water color work is still moving on; I’m not at all sure about the heavier medium. There are times when I place drawing pure and simple (the simpler and purer the better) above any complicated painted surface in oils. On the other hand, though, our sum total of experience and accumulated knowledge may never lead us into formal empty demonstration. Expression is the quintessence of art, I believe.

I would like to answer your letter sentence by sentence, for there is much meat in it. I, we both here, gather that you are feeling deadliness in your environment “out there,” and that it has become high time for you to make a break-away and get to concentrated art activity. For all the pent-up energy in oneself, there are influences (better described as a lack of atmosphere in present environment) which atrophy one’s best efforts, the more that one’s “best” is never entirely conscious and therefore without protective armor. Now, Mark, this is your present reaction to the West and especially, if that for you is to be managed, without teaching duties and the consequent drain on, and scattering of, one’s energies. Afterwards, you can go back to that most glorious part of the continent as we imagine it to be, and it will give you whatever you feel the need for, quite freely.

Speaking in your letter of [Marsden] Hartley, it happened to Julia and myself that we went...