Seattle Now & Then: Mark Tobey in the Market

jrsherrard

7 years ago

(click to enlarge photos)

THEN: Mark Tobey, almost certainly Seattle’s historically most celebrated artist, poses in the early 1960s with some Red Delicious apples beside the Sanitary Market in the Pike Place Market. (Courtesy, Museum of History and Industry)

NOW: The public market enthusiasts posing for Jean Sherrard on a Pike Place sidewalk are, left to right, Sara Patton, Ernie Dornfeld, Paul Dorpat, Jack Mathers, Heather McAuliffe, Paul Dunn, Kate Krafft and John Turnbull.

The posers in Jean Sherrard’s “repeat” are members of a new creation: the Pike Place Market Historical Society. By studied accord the members have concluded that Mark Tobey, the celebrated artist posing beside the artfully stacked Red Delicious apples in our “then,” prefigured their position. Both are standing at the cusp of the ground floor of the Public Market’s Sanitary Market Building and the sidewalk on the east side of Pike Place. At the top of their circle, Market merchant Jack Mathers, holding a crab, joins the historians. This fishmonger-musician has been stocking and selling at his steaming Jack’s Fish Spot since 1982.

**Cornish at Harvard and Roy under construction. Like the later record of the completed school, this on also looks west on Roy.**

Mark Tobey first arrived in Seattle in the early 1920s, hired by Nellie Cornish, a respected piano teacher, to build a new visual arts department for her namesake school that was then primarily admired for its music and dance programs. In his early thirties, Tobey brought with him from New York City some success working as a magazine illustrator. It was long before he was often honored world-wide with solo shows and awards, including the Grand International Prize at the Venice Biennale of 1958.

Tobey was largely self-taught and quick to revelations. Most important of these inspirations was his “white writing,” an at once flat and floating atmosphere made from squiggles and brush strokes influenced by Oriental calligraphy and much else. By the testimony of his students, Tobey was also a volatile mass of pedagogic pizzazz, at once attracting and repelling. An early student, Viola Hansen Patterson, confessed, “He was full of tremendous energy, such energy he’d bowl you over — Almost blow you out of the room. I did take three lessons with him, and then I caved in. It was too much for me.”

**Another of Tobey at the Pike Place Public Market, perhaps on the same day – perhaps not.**

A Post-Intelligencer photographer snapped the Tobey in the Market portrait featured at the top, which is held at the Museum of History and Industry. MOHAI photographer Howard Giske assigns it a deliberated date. “That photograph of Mark Tobey was dated July 1961 by the PI staffers, but he seems overdressed for July…the dates recorded for the PI photos are often the file date and not creation date, so maybe just say 1961.”

Kate Krafft, second from the right in Jean Sherrard’s circle of Market historians, has written about Mark Tobey’s fondness for the Pike Place Market and the importance of his activism in its preservation. “In 1939 and 1940 he spent many of his days in the Pike Place Public Market sketching produce, architecture and particularly the people of the Market. Between 1941 and 1945, he completed a distinctive series of pictures in tempera paint that were based on the prior market sketches, combining figurative work within the abstract-like maze of daily market activity. . . In 1964 the University of Washington Press published Mark Tobey: The World of the Market, a volume that included many of his Pike Place Market sketches and studio paintings with an introduction expressing his deep affection for the Market.”

Krafft continues, “Late in the hard-fought seven-year long campaign to ‘Keep the Market,’ Friends of the Market mounted a public initiative campaign. The campaign needed to finance television spots but lacked the necessary funds.” Here the by then famous artist donated 29 lithographs to the Friends. This gift served, Krafft concludes, as collateral for “a bank loan that funded the subsequent television ad campaign. The November 1971 public initiative was approved by the citizens of Seattle, thus creating what is known today as the Pike Place Market Historic District.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, boys? Certainly Jean, and again (and again) all are probably repeats in whole and in their parts. We have put up a few features circulating about the Pike Market over the last few months and so we again follow our common pedagogy that “repetition is the mother of all learning.” Sounds like Horace, but certainly I first learned it from my own mother, Eda Garena, Christiansen-Dorpat.

Ron Edge has again plucked forward a few neighborhood features from the past, and following those we will use this week’s artsy temper as an opportunity to update our readers on the condition now of MOFA, our Museum Of Forsaken Art. It is time now to join the membership. As you will discover near the bottom all it takes is colored printer to produce an impressively official looking membership certificate and a witness for forge your name as your forge theirs.

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One of a few thousand portraits I took from our apartment above Peters on Broadway (southeast corner of Broadway and Republican) in the mid-60s. We like the subject and her appointments, and the wear of the posters on the bus stop shelter wall behind her. Notice that we have flipped this image from the posture the subject takes below in MOFA’s CERTIFICATE OF MEMBERSHIP. Please join. It costs nothing and promises nothing. MOFA was first “announced” in late October 2013 at an Ivar’s Salmon House Banguet at which the about 75 dinners attending were obliged to pay for their own salmon (Jean tells me that some skipped out leaving Jean to pay the charge.) and bring for donation a object of forsaken art to add to the Museum’s collection. And all those attending were made members – even the freeloaders. You cannot discriminate. While we mean to catalogue this growing collection and show it both on line and off, with descriptions and criticisms author by the members, we are, like you too busy to get at it. However, we have continued to receove (and pursue) a lot of new works for the Museum, and we will sample a few o;f these below.

**Now please find a colored printer and print the above, and then file it under, we suggest, MOFA. . Other Instructions may follow.**

FOLLOWS NOW A FEW NEW* ADDITIONS TO MOFA (*While new to the collection, they may be otherwise old.) Details regarding their sources (the artists), medium and size will be included in the work that we are having a difficult time getting to. This, we assure you, is not because we dread it. We do not dread it. Rather, we will be thrilled to do it . . . later. (Might you be a interested in helping . . . please?) If we know a title we will use it, but rarely do we know the artist. A reminder – these are, or rather were, forsaken and for reasons not explained. Most of them were formerly objectionable objects de art, and some surely remain so.

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