Julius Tobias (1915-1999)

Julius Tobias was born in New York in 1915, dropped out of school during the Great Depression, and would go on to fight as a U.S.A.F. bombardier in Europe during World War II. Sparked by an early interest in art, he leveraged the G.I. Bill and returned to Paris after the war to study with Fernand Léger, whose politically charged humanism had a lasting effect on his work.

Upon his return to New York, Tobias explored Abstract Expressionist and Constructivist styles. Always in tune with the art movements of his time but never stylistically dogmatic, Tobias has remained somewhat of an enigma within the art world. His paintings from the 1950s and 1960s have a poetic, minimalist tone similar to that of his contemporary Mark Rothko. In the early 1960s, he created a series of wall-sized white paintings. These laid the formal foundation for his sculptural work of the mid-1960s, in which concrete, steel, or wood, created contained environments that blocked or corralled the viewer. Like his contemporary Richard Serra, Tobias filled and sometimes even barricaded galleries with vast sculptural materials, and eventually moved into outdoor spaces to work on a more monumental scale. Gradually, over the course of a decade, he moved from pure expressionist abstractions to incorporate the more hard-edge aspects of neo-Plasticism.

In the 80s, after years of abstraction, he returned to figurative painting and socially-conscious content. The new work was dark and expressionistic, with repeated images of stacked bodies. It reflected both his memories of war, with specific references to the Holocaust, and his perception of escalating violence in the late 20th century.

Tobias explored the fluid border between abstraction and reality in both painting and sculpture, pushing the boundaries of the two media in size and form. Though he spent a significant portion of his career creating groundbreaking Minimalist sculptural environments, he always considered himself a painter first and foremost. His canvases integrate expressionist brushwork with broad areas of color or, in his most subtle works, vast fields of white. These works insist on the materiality of paint, creating an emphasis on surface that speaks to his interest in probing the “reality” of abstraction.

A traveling retrospective of Tobias’ work was organized by the State University of New York, Stony Brook in 1992. Examples of his work can be found in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Over the course of his career he was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner awards, and multiple National Endowment for the Arts grants. He passed away in New York in 1999.

Source: The New York Times and Hollis Taggart Galleries