Mark Tobey

MARK TOBEY (Canterville, 1890 - Basel, 1976).
Untitled, 1960.
Mixed media on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower area.
With certificate of authenticity.
Measurements: 23 x 18 cm, 60 x 50 cm (frame).

Mark George Tobey was an American abstract expressionist painter. Widely recognized in the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most prominent among the "mystical painters of the Northwest" who had a strong influence on the others. A friend and mentor, Tobey shared his interests in philosophy and Eastern religions with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Willem de Kooning, and was a founder of the Northwest School.

Studying Chinese calligraphy and Zen painting, he developed from 1935 onwards a meditative painting consisting of a tingling of signs.

After attending the Art Institute of Chicago from 1906 to 1908, he went to New York in 1911, where he worked as a portraitist and draughtsman for a fashion house. He had his first exhibition in 1917 at the Knoedler Gallery. The First World War affected him deeply, giving birth to his hatred of the destructive capacity of Western culture.

Tobey converted in 1918 to Baha'ism and settled in 1922 in Seattle. In 1923 he met Teng Kuei, a Chinese student and painter, who introduced him to calligraphy. From 1922 to 1925, Tobey taught art classes. He then traveled through France (Paris, Châteaudun) and Spain (Barcelona), Greece, Constantinople, Beirut, Haifa, where he became interested in Arabic and Persian scripts.

In 1927, he returned to Seattle and participated in 1928 in the founding of the "Free and Creative Art School". In 1929 Alfred Barr presented his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1930 to 1937 he settled in Devonshire, teaching at Dartington Hall School. He traveled in Europe and also to Mexico in 1931 and Palestine in 1932. In 1934, to study calligraphy and painting, he resided in China with Teng Kuei and then went to Japan where he lived in a Zen monastery in Kyoto. In 1935, back in England, he painted, in November or December, several canvases (Broadway, Welcome Hero, Broadway Norm with a "white writing" (White writing) that would be the essential characteristic of his work and that, according to critics, had a decisive influence on the evolution of Jackson Pollock. Tobey's "White Writings" are characterized as "a network of fine calligraphic signs" that gradually become increasingly abstract and unintelligible. These highly sensitive works are the best expression of his introspective and meditative lifestyle. His style contrasts with the expressiveness of action painting.

His first musical composition dates from 1938. In 1939 Tobey returned to Seattle, studied piano and music theory, developed in 1942 his calligraphic experience, exhibited in New York in 1944 and 1951, Paris, Jeanne Bucher Gallery, in 1955. In 1956 he received the Guggenheim International Award, in 1958 he presented a retrospective exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum and won the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.

In 1959 he painted a fresco for the Washington National Library, settled in Basel in 1960, received the 1961 First Prize of the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh and exhibited in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. He participated in the documenta II and III in Kassel (1959 and 1964). In 1962 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a new retrospective of his work. In 1966 Tobey traveled to Haifa and Madrid where his visit to the Prado Museum marked him deeply.

He went on to exhibit in New York, 1967, Dallas, 1968 and a retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, 1974. Mark Tobey, who was called "the old master of young American painting", died in Basel in 1976.