Alton Tobey, 90, Artist of Historical Themes and Portraits
Hyfler/Rosner
BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 10, 2005
Tobey with Einstein:
His murals:
http://www.altontobey.com/murals2.html
His golden books:
http://www.dolice.com/Tobey4.html
Alton Tobey, who died Tuesday at age 90, was an artist whose
work included hundreds of historical illustrations for
Golden Books, portraits of luminaries such as Albert
Einstein and Robert Merrill, and large-scale murals that
hang in courthouses and museums such as the Smithsonian and
the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum.
Among his most widely viewed work was a series of paintings
executed for Life magazine and the Smithsonian that depicted
historical dramas such as Etruscan battles, brain
trephination in the Andes, and a comparative mural of
tattooed and pierced people around the world titled
"Cultural Mutilations in Pursuit of Beauty."
Tobey's historical paintings and murals were done in an
almost stereotypical idealism, but he also worked in a
variety of other styles, including "curvilinear," a
decorative, semiabstract form he invented.
Tobey grew up at New York, where his father was a tailor
whose work included making parade uniforms for the National
Guard. Tobey claimed that he knew from an early age that he
was destined to be an artist. He won his first art school
contest at age 9 and eventually got a full scholarship to
Yale University. His studies were interrupted by World War
II, during which Tobey turned his art to practical purposes
by producing blueprints of fighter aircraft.
Tobey taught art for several years at Yale and eventually
married one of his students, Rosalyn Caplovitz, a musician
and piano teacher. The couple moved to Larchmont, N.Y.,
where they erected a modernist home of Tobey's own design.
Their neighbors, in vintage Tudor and colonial-style houses,
protested at first but soon relented.
During the early 1950s, Tobey began working on Golden Books
histories, a series of primers familiar to anyone who grew
up in the era, featuring patriotic panoply of the Pilgrims,
Founding Fathers, Civil War battles, and the like. Life
magazine began running his historical paintings soon after
under the rubric "Epic of Man." In 1957, Tobey painted two
Life covers, including one featuring a scimitar-wielding
Cossack about to whack off the head of a cringing serf.
During the 1960s, Tobey began traveling extensively in Latin
America, at first to research "Epic of Man" images and later
for pleasure. Latin styles and color schemes began to appear
in his paintings, and he produced pictures of conquistadors
and Indian dancers, as well as portraits of Diego Rivera and
Frieda Kahlo.
Two of his portraits, "The Apollo Astronauts" and "Brothers
United" - of John and Robert Kennedy - were reproduced on
posters and sold millions of copies.
Tobey painted hundreds of portraits of the famous, including
Pope John Paul II, General MacArthur, and President
Eisenhower. Tobey was inspired by Einstein's observation
that there is no such thing as a straight line in nature to
produce paintings in his "curvilinear style," perhaps his
most original contribution to art.
In the 1980s,Tobey began producing "Fragments," a series of
photorealistic body parts - hands, lips, half a face -
magnified by several times. Although his paintings of the
famous tended to valorize their subjects in best
civic-lesson style, Tobey was also capable of trenchant
criticism, as in a weird multiple portrait of Ronald Reagan
in which the former president disappears, Cheshire
Cat-style, except for his grin.
Alton Tobey
Born November 5, 1910, at Middletown, Conn.; died January 4
at the Sarah Neuman nursing home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., after
suffering a stroke; survived by his children, David and
Judy, and two grandchildren.