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SOCIAL COMMENTARY PORTRAITS CURVILINEARS
OUTLINE BIO PUBLISHED LATIN
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Tobey's intense involvement with historical research, as well as his reputation for absolute accuracy in all his projects led to his work being commissioned by a number of companies as collectible plates, which were very much in vogue in the 1970's and1980's. The painting above for the cover of the magazine was Tobey's own self portrait.
Images of some of his better known collectible works are included here, in addition to those originally published in this Plate Collector magazine article about his work, printed in it's entirety below.
Murals to Plates"by Susan K. Elliott
"Plate Collector" magazine
August 1, 1981
There
are no accidents in a painting by Alton S. Tobey. By the time
he gets to the painting stage, so much research has gone into
the subject that whether it be a Siberian Tiger portrait for
a collection of 50 cats or a bloody massacre scene from the Russian
Revolution. each detail is precise and accurate.
In
the plate field, Tobey now applies the same close attention to
his mural plates for the Ghent Collection, and in the past designed
historical and Christmas issues for the Franklin Mint and Royal
Doulton.
Describing
himself as "the fastest brush in the East"." the
67-year-old Larchmont, N.Y. artist once demonstrated his talent
for both research and speed in a collection of 300 paintings
on American History for a 12-volume Golden Books set. Tobey estimates
that there may have been 2,000 hands in all the paintings, completed
in an exhausting 18 months in the early '60s. [To see paintings from the series, see our Golden Books page elsewhere in the Published Works section on this website.]
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The publishers were so delighted by Tobey's feat that they sent him and wife Rosalyn on an all-expenses-paid 64-day vacation to Europe. Projects such as this haD fine-honed his ability to work quickly without sacrificing quality. Remembering the job, Tobey said:
There were no second thoughts. Once a thing was done, there was such a pressure to continue that the result was that I just had to decide the correct shape, speed, color and texture before I put on a stroke. And by the time the last painting was done, I was reasonably finished as well"
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This humor finds expression in Tobey's largely non-commercial work, such as a large adaptation of Rodin's "Thinker," a contemplative gorilla in painter's smock, done in green, which hangs in his living room. "I can tell you this much," Tobey said, pointing to the painting. "I'll be very sad if this painting goes. Simply because I'll have to patch the wall in back of it." |
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The house is filled with Tobey's paintings, many of them abstracts, using an alphabet of curvilinear shapes he developed over a 15-year period. In his basement studio, reached by descending an iron spiral staircase, paintings of every description fill several small rooms adjacent to his main work area.
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The first group of hanging paintings that ones sees shows Beethoven in thought, accomplished in a series of large and small works with the great musician's head expanded, compressed and vibrating in simulation of the explosion of his genius during creation. |
(Images of all seven of the Beethoven series of paintings can be found at the end of our "portraits" page on this website.)
A turn to the left leads to the main studio where a portrait in progress of his 27-year-old son David (an accomplished violinist now playing in the orchestra of the Broadway musical Sugar Babies) stares across the room at a portrait, still in the preliminary green base state, or a prominent New York physician. An easel in the next room holds a completed portrait of a Catholic cardinal, resplendent in red vestments.
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(Many other portraits of famous and some infamous people can be found on our "Portraits" pages elsewhere on this website.)
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Abstract and realistic works exist side by side, illustrating the two sides of Tobey's schizophrenic painting style. An experienced muralist, he was just completing a 13-year commission depicting the life of General Douglas MacArthur. |
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The Ghent Collection [who had published a number of plates based upon original paintings by Norman Rockwell and other famous contemporary painters and illustrators] suggested he do a plate mural to honor Israel's 30th anniversary. After completing the sixth MacArthur Mural, one of a group installed between 1966 and 1977 in the MacArthur Memorial building in Norfolk, Va., Tobey turned his skills to making a miniature mural of the highlights of Israel's history for Numa and its mail-order division, Ghent.
"I find it quite fascinating because I consider these as murals. They could be expanded to 20 times the size and they would be very handsome murals, so that they're not just episodes, but they're designed for a circular area. I construe them as essentially miniature murals, which is a sort of contradiction."
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After seeing Tobey's work for the Israeli issue, Ghent decided to follow it with a unique series of annual plates commemorating the important events of the year just past. Selling the plates sight unseen, the plates were described to collectors by the types of subjects they would contain.
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Three of the "Memories" plates that Tobey designed for the Ghent Collection. Each edition was limited so that the number of the plates produced corresponded to the number of the year in which they were made.
A format developed for the placement of important news events in the plates. With suggestions from Ghent and his own notes on what should make the Memories plate review, Tobey begins work. Explaining that "there's always an element of incoherence" in the murals, Tobey calls the plates "literally a Roxie stage of events and individuals."
"Nevertheless, there is a certain organization. Usually in the upper left-hand area is the obituary. If a person is in the upper left-hand area, they had better get worried. And, of course, occupying the center of the plate is the important event. This year it will be the present President, plus the Saturn. There's usually the sport area diagonally across the plate at the lower right, depending on the emphasis."
---Alton Tobey
Subsequent plates for Ghent have included The Pilgrim of Peace, a tribute to Pope Paul VI, and The Official 1980 Olympic Winter Games plate, as well as another Olympic plate for the ill-fated 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow without U.S. participation.
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"This design was an extraordinary challenge, because I had to depict a variety of events in a way which would convey the incredible excitement of the Winter Games. I studied hundreds of photos of past Olympics, to be able to feel the essential nature of each event, and then arranged my interpretations in a design almost like an island, surrounded by snow -- white china. I think it's a dynamic approach to an unusual and very challenging project. I am very pleased with the results." --- Alton Tobey
on the "Winter Olympics" plate.
Born in Connecticut, Tobey is fond of joking that he "loafed until he was three." His father was a uniform tailor responsible for outfitting such groups as the Connecticut Governor's Footguard, the Horse Guard and sometimes the police department.
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Encouraged by his family to go ahead and be an artist if that's what he wanted, Tobey vividly recalls overhearing a conversation between his mother and one of his many aunts (his mother was one of 17 children).
"I've been drawing and sculpting as far back as I can recollect. My mother, particularly, was very supportive. I can remember being underneath the kitchen table at a rather tender age doing some drawing. It was a large table and there was a forest of legs surrounding me.
"I can hear what my aunt's saying to my mother, 'What have you got against the boy? He's going to die in a garret in Greenwich Village. He's intelligent, why don't you make him a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman?' And I can remember my mother replying, 'If he wants to be an artist, let him be an artist'."
A graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, Tobey's achievements since have ranged from meeting the need for a mathematics instructor at Pratt Whitney Aircraft in a Navy training program during World War II ("I stayed one lesson ahead of my class") to going on assignment for LIFE magazine in the jungles of Guatemala to record an archaeological dig conducted by the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s.
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Another LIFE project had him collaborating with a Chinese professor living in Formosa who "was an old man, a diabetic, semi-blind and allowed to read for only an hour a day." |
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As
Tobey completed drawings for the Epic of Man series on
the ancient Chinese Shang Dynasty, a LIFE courier
plane would deliver them to the professor for his critique and
return them to the artist for further work.
"I would make a more complicated,
a more finished drawing and he would red pencil that. Then I
would have something that was half finished and it would be flown
over, back and forth, in special trips by this LIFE courier plane.
I would hesitate to venture how much this thing must have cost
them."
