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Mark Tobey

(b Centerville, WI, 11 Dec 1890; d Basle, Switzerland, 24 April 1976). American painter. In 1893 the family moved to Jacksonville, TN, but because of the poor educational facilities there they returned a year later to Wisconsin. Moving again in 1906 to Hammond, IN, Tobey attended high school and on Saturdays travelled to Chicago to study the techniques of watercolour and oil painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, this being his only formal art training. In 1909 the family moved to Chicago where, because of his father's illness, he was forced to give up his studies and find employment. After various jobs he eventually became a fashion illustrator. During this period he discovered the great art of the past, first through reproductions and then by visiting the Art Institute of Chicago. He was especially attracted to Italian Renaissance paintings and to works by a variety of artists including Frans Hals, John Singer Sargent and Joaqu?n Sorolla y Bastida.

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Biography: Mark Tobey

The American painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was probably best known for his delicate, abstract works done in a style called "white writing."

Mark Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin, on December 11, 1890, the youngest of four children. Until 1906 the family lived in Tremplealeau, a small Wisconsin village situated on the Mississippi River. There Tobey led a life much like the legendary Tom Sawyer, commenting later that until he was 16 his whole life was "purely nature." His family were devout Congregationalists, and very early a religious sensitivity was instilled into the boy's life. His parents were hard working and creative, and to encourage Mark's artistic bent they sent him to classes each Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago. This was the only formal art training that he would receive.

In 1909 the family moved to Chicago, where Tobey worked as a fashion illustrator. Two years later he felt confident enough to move to Greenwich Village in New York City where he found a job with McCall's Magazine. Until 1917 he travelled back and forth between Chicago and New York, well paid as an illustrator, interior designer, and charcoal portraitist. Through this last medium he gained recognition in elite social and theatrical circles.

His first one-man show was at M. Knoedler & Co. in New York, arranged in 1917 by Marie Steiner. It was Steiner who introduced Tobey to Juliet Thompson, a portrait painter for whom he agreed to pose. She was a follower of the Bahá' í World Faith, and through her Tobey gained an interest in, and in 1918 accepted, the faith that was to redirect and guide not only the rest of his life but his artistic development as well.

At this time a ferment seemed to take place in Tobey's approach to his art. He reacted against the "Renaissance sense of space and order" in his belief that forms should be free and dynamic. "I wanted to give the light that was in the form in space a release." Unfortunately, the works that illustrated this attitude are now lost. Encouraged by a friend, Tobey left New York for Seattle in 1922. He exchanged the cultural and intellectual stimulation of New York for the natural beauty, relaxed milieu, and diffused, almost Parisian, light of the western city. He was offered a teaching position at the Cornish School, an experience of which he always spoke with pleasure and satisfaction.

According to Tobey, it was at night, in a small and centrally lighted classroom, that he made his "personal discovery of cubism." He imagined a fly moving in every direction around him and the objects in the room. This movement, creating a complex of lines and imaginary planes and shapes, was to develop into the structural "animation of space, " the interpenetration of mass and void, that formed the basis for most of his mature paintings.

In 1923 Tobey met a young Chinese artist, Teng Kuei, and from him learned the technique of calligraphy. This enabled him to discover the freely moving brush with which he could assimilate his concept of animated space. He had become aware, in Seattle, of the closeness of the Orient, but had also found stimulation in the art of the Northwest and Alaskan Indians. His interest in and devotion to a marriage of Eastern and Western ideas was reinforced by his exposure to artists and intellectuals at Dartington Hall, a school and cultural center about 200 miles from London. Tobey taught here from 1930 to 1938, meeting Aldous Huxley, Pearl Buck, and Arthur Waley, among others. And it was here, after a visit to the Orient in 1934, that his distinctive style originated.

In Shanghai Tobey stayed with the family of his friend Teng Kuei. He was impressed with the energy, lines, and textures of the cosmopolitan city as well as with the characteristics of Chinese life, art, and culture. Later he travelled to Japan, spending a month in a Zen monastery. He practiced calligraphy and painting, wrote his own poetry, and attempted meditation. It was an experience which seemed to crystalize all of his accumulated ideas and impressions.

Back at Dartington Hall, Tobey began to experiment with a small picture, making up a mesh of whitish lines on a dark background, scattering in the maze small forms in blue and other colors. In a sudden flashback, the image he created was no longer Oriental at all, but was New York. "He realized that it was Broadway, with all the people caught in the lights." This painting (Broadway Norm, 1935), however modest, seems to separate his earlier works from his maturity. Tobey himself was shocked by his unplanned breakthrough. The work initiated the style which was later known as "white writing" and on which his early fame rests. Thus Tobey was nearly 45 years old before the diverse aspects of his art began to coalesce.

Tobey returned to Seattle in 1938, and during the following decade he developed further white writing, movable space, and moving focus (White Night, 1942). In 1943 he painted pictures based on three years of study of the Pike Place Public Market, Seattle, combining figurative work with the abstract-like maze of activity in the market. City themes, especially those of New York, followed in the 1930s and 1940s. These were continuous and central to his expression, and, rather than painted in oil, they were usually small works executed on paper with water soluble medium. The city paintings soon spilled over the confines of a specific locale to become a "universal city, " a world view of ultimate unity that was both theological and esthetic. Simultaneously, Tobey expanded his visual field, a development made possible by the concept of an aerial view (Transcontinental, 1946). In these works, the observer is drawn with willing mind and eye into an unknown space of meaning, form, and color.

The award of the Grand International Prize at the Venice Biennale of 1958 acknowledged the importance of Tobey's art. He was the first American painter since Whistler to achieve this honor. Possibly due to the acclaim he received in Europe, Tobey began to paint large pictures which invited the use of oil paint. Thus in the 1950s and 1960s his canvasses expanded with a delicate, refined abstraction which anticipated Jackson Pollack's all-over style. Sagittarius Red (1963) is thought by many to be his ultimate masterpiece.

In 1960 Tobey moved to Basel, Switzerland, a change he had long contemplated, as he sensed the atmosphere in America stifling for the work he felt was in his future. Curiously, while European critics and artists considered him the pre-eminent American painter, in the United States his work was treated with disdain, as were the honors bestowed on him abroad. Tobey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960, but declined the membership.

Tobey's paintings were exhibited frequently at select small shows, but the first major homage to his work was a one-man exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the modern wing of the Louvre, in 1960. Two years later a retrospective of Tobey's works was seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1974, possibly his crowning achievement was the exhibition at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., "Tribute to Mark Tobey." It was a testimony to his creativity and stamina at an advanced age and to his unique position in American art. He was a member of no school, follower of no master, largely self-taught, entirely self-defined.

Rather than confining his art to technical expression, Tobey's work represents a philosophical conclusion, spanning the dichotomy of East and West into the contraction and balancing of all forces of the globe into eye-range. For Tobey, in order for the world to avoid catastrophe it must find an equilibrium reconciling science and religion, the past and the future, the material and the spiritual. His move toward abstraction came from his search for this expression in artistic language.

Early years

Tobey was the youngest of four children born to George Tobey, a carpenter and house builder, and Emma Cleveland Tobey -- his mother was over 40 when Tobey was born. The Tobeys were devout Congregationalists. Tobey's father carved animals of red stone and sometimes drew animals for the young Tobey to cut out with scissors. In 1893, his family settled in Chicago.^[2] As a youth, Tobey studied art for a brief period at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1906 to 1908, but like the others of the Northwest School, Tobey was mostly self-taught.

In 1911, he moved to New York where he worked as a fashion illustrator for McCall's magazine and made some money as a portraitist. His first one-man show was held at M. Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1917.

In the following years, Tobey delved into works of Arabian literature and teachings of East Asian philosophy with the consequence that he joined the Baha’i Faith in 1918, which led him to explore the representation of the spiritual in art.^[3]

Career

Early years

Tobey's arrival in Seattle in 1922 was partly an effort for a new start following his short marriage and divorce. When the ex-wife found's Tobey's address, she sent him a box of his clothes topped with a copy of Rudyard Kipling's ‘’The Light That Failed’’.^[4]

In 1923, Tobey met Teng Kuei, a Chinese painter and student at the University of Washington, who introduced Tobey to Eastern penmanship, beginning Tobey’s exploration of Chinese calligraphy.

Tobey went to Europe in 1925, beginning his lifelong travels. He settled in Paris and met Gertrude Stein.^[5]

His travels took him to Château dun, where he spent one winter, and to Barcelona and Greece. In Constantinople, Beirut and Haifa, he studied Arab and Persian writing.

When Tobey returned to Seattle in 1927, he shared a studio in the ballroom of a house near the Cornish School with the teenaged artist Robert Bruce Inverarity, who was 20 years Tobey's junior. From a high school project of Inverarity's, Tobey became sufficiently interested in three-dimensional form to carve some 100 pieces of soap sculpture.

In 1928, Tobey co-founded the Free and Creative Art School in Seattle.

In 1929, Tobey was a juror for the Northwest Annual Exhibition. That year, he had the show that marked a change in his life: a solo exhibition at Romany Marie's Cafe Gallery in New York. Alfred Barr. Jr., then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), saw the show and selected several pictures from it for inclusion in MoMA's Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans exhibition, which opened in 1930.

In 1931, Tobey sailed on the Britannia to England, to teach at Dartington Hall, in Devon. There, he was resident artist of the ‘’Elmhurst Progressive School.’’ In addition to teaching, he painted frescoes for the school. He became a close friend of noted potter Bernard Leach, who was also on the faculty. Introduced by Tobey to Baha'i, Leach also became a convert. Tobey's travels during this period included Mexico (1931), Europe, and Palestine (1932).

In 1934, Tobey and Leach traveled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company. Leach went on to Japan, while Tobey remained to visit Teng Kuei, his old friend from Seattle, before going on to Japan. Japanese authorities confiscated and destroyed an edition of 31 drawings on wet paper that Tobey had brought with him from England to be published in Japan. No explanation for their destruction has been recorded; possibly they considered his sketches of nude men pornographic. Only a few sets remain in existence. Tobey spent late June and early July in a Zen monastery outside Kyoto to study Hai-Ku poetry and calligraphy before returning to Seattle that autumn.

Mid-career

'Canticle', casein on paper by Mark Tobey, 1954

In 1935, Tobey held his first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. He yo-yoed from New York to Washington, D.C. to Alberta, Canada, back to England, and to Haifa to visit the principal shrine of Baha'i. Sometime in November or December, at Dartington Hall, working at night, listening to the horses breathe in the field outside his window, he painted a series of three paintings, ’’Broadway’’, ‘’Welcome Hero’’, and ‘’Broadway Norm’’, in the style that would come to be known as "white writing" (an interlacing of fine white lines).

Tobey expected to continue teaching in England in 1938, but the mounting tensions of war building in Europe kept him in the United States. Instead, he began to work on the Federal Art Project, under the supervision of Robert Inverarity, the young friend he met 11 years before.

In June 1939, Tobey attended a Baha'i summer school and overstayed his allotted vacation time. Inverarity dropped him from the WPA project. Fortunately, paintings he had done on the project were included in a WPA exhibition that August, where they were seen by Marian Willard, who operated an art gallery in New York.

By 1942, Tobey's process of abstractionism was accompanied by a new calligraphic experiment. In 1944, Tobey’s show at the Willard Gallery, New York brought him success, the catalogue prefaced by Sidney Janis. In 1945, Tobey gave a solo exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon. The Arts Club of Chicago held solo shows of Tobey’s work in 1940 and 1946.

Tobey studied the piano and the theory of music with Lockrem Johnson, and, when Johnson was away, with Wesley Wehr in 1949 introduced to Tobey by their pianist friend Berthe Poncy Jacobson. Wehr was just an undergraduate at the time, but he accepted the opportunity to serve as a stand-in music composition tutor for Tobey and over time became friends with Tobey and Tobey’s circle of artists, becoming a painter himself, as well as a chronicler of the group.

1951 was a busy year. Tobey showed at the Whitney Museum of New York; on the invitation of Joseph Albers, Tobey spent three months as guest critic of graduate art-students’ work at Yale University; and Tobey’s first retrospective was held at the palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

In 1952, the film “Tobey Mark: Artist” debuted in the Venice and Edinburgh film festivals. In 1955, Tobey traveled to Paris and presented a solo show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris; then traveled to Basle and Bern.

In 1957, he began his Sumi ink paintings.

Later years

The artist settled in Basel, Switzerland in 1960, and in September took part in Vienna’s Congress of the International Association of the Visual Arts on the topic “The East - Occident”.

In 1961, he became the first American painter ever to exhibit at the Louvre's Pavillon de Marsan in Paris.

Solo presentations of Tobey’s work were held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1962, and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1966. In the same year, Tobey traveled to the Baha'i world center in Haifa, then visited the Prado in Madrid.

In 1967, Tobey shows at the Willard Gallery, New York. The next year, he had a Retrospective show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. The following year, Tobey painted a mural fresco for the national Library of Congress in Washington, D.C..

Another major retrospective of the artist’s work took place at the National Collection of Fine Arts, a part of the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C. in 1974.

Tobey would have liked to remarry, but he didn't. He lived for 25 years with Pehr Hallsten, in Seattle and Basel. Hallsten died in Basel in 1965, while Tobey died there on April 24, 1976.^[6]

Awards

1968, "Commander, Arts and the Letters of the French Government".
1961, won first prize, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh;
1959 , became the first American since James McNeill Whistler to win the Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale
1956, elected at the National Institute of Arts and Letters
1956, Guggenheim International Award.

Posthumous individual exhibitions

November 11, 1997 – January 12, 1998, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The exhibition brought together about 130 works from some 56 different collections, covering the years from 1924 to 1975.
1990, Galerie Beyeler, Basel
1989, Museum Folkwang, Essen
1984, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Permanent collections

At least 5 of his works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Northwest Art.^[7] Tobey's work can be found in most major museums in the U.S. and internationally, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Influence on other artists

Helmi Juvonen, another Northwest School artist, was obsessed with Tobey. She was diagnosed as a manic depressive, and suffered the delusion that she and Tobey were man and wife, a point of misinformation which she shared with almost anyone.
Tobey's romantic friend Elizabeth Bayley Willis showed Tobey's painting Bars and Flails to Jackson Pollock in 1944. Pollock studied the painting closely and then painted Blue Poles, a painting that made history when the Australian government bought it for $2 million. Pollock's biographers write: "...[Tobey's] dense web of white strokes, as elegant as Oriental calligraphy, impressed Jackson so much that in a letter to Louis Bunce he described Tobey, a West Coast artist, as an 'exception' to the rule that New York was 'the only real place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru'" (Jackson Pollock).

"#wp-_note-white-writing_style_paintings">[8] Jackson Pollock went to all of Mark Tobey's Willard Gallery shows in New York. Here, Tobey presented small to medium sized canvases, approximately 33 by 45 inches. Jackson Pollock would see them and go home and blow them up to twelve by nine feet, pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on. Pollock was never really concerned with diffused light. But he was very interested in Tobey's idea of covering the entire canvas with marks up to and including its edges. This had never been done before in American art.^[9]

Style

Tobey is most famous for his creation of so-called "white writing" - an overlay of white or light-colored calligraphic symbols on an abstract field which is often itself composed of thousands of small and interwoven brush strokes. This method, in turn, gave rise to the type of "all-over" painting style made most famous by Jackson Pollock, another American painter to whom Tobey is often compared. ^[10]

Tobey’s work is also defined as creating a vibratory space with the multiple degrees of mobility obtained by the Brownian movement of a light brush on a bottom with the dense tonalities. The series of “Broadway” realized at that time has a historical value of reference today. It precedes a new dimension of the pictorial vision, that of contemplation in the action.

His work is inspired by a personal belief system that suggests Oriental influences and reference to Tobey's involvement in the Baha’i Faith. Four of Tobey's signed lithographs hang in the reception hall in the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing institution of the Baha’i Faith.

Quotes

Looking at Willis's collection of ethnic textiles, Tobey said:

"A painting should be a textile, a texture. That's enough! Perhaps I was influenced by my mother. She used to sew and sew. I can still see that needle going. Maybe that's what I'd rather do than anything with the brush-like stitching over and over and over, laying it in, going over, bringing it up. Bringing it up. That's what is difficult."

Speaking of the trip to China and Japan that preceded his breakthrough:.^[11]

"It's been said I was searching for new techniques; nothing of the sort. I was really enjoying myself, learning to do things that interested me. When I returned to England, I was disturbed. I began to daub on a canvas and I was puzzled by the result -- a few streaks of white, some blue streaks -- looked like a distorted nest. It bothered me. What I had learned in the Orient had affected me more than I realized. This was a new approach. I couldn't shake it off. So I had to absorb it before it consumed me. In a short time white writing emerged. I had a totally new conception of painting. The Orient has been the greatest influence of my life."

One of Tobey’s students in Seattle was Windsor Utley, who maintained a friendship with Tobey throughout the 1950s. Tobey wrote to Utley:^[12]

"I really am sick of modern art really - it’s small pickins now. The best work seems to have been done in the early decades of the 20th century."

The significance of Tobey’s Baha’i Faith in relation to his art is something that Tobey himself acknowledged on many occasions, including in 1934 when he wrote:

"The root of all religions, from the Baha’i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one - that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value... Mine are the Orient, the Occident, science, religion, cities, space, and writing a picture."

Bibliography

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, & Tobey, M. (1975). Mark Tobey in Victoria. Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, no. 2. Victoria, B.C.: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
Restany, P., & Tobey, M. (1961). Mark Tobey; pragmatism in calligraphy. Paris: Cimaise.
Tobey, M. (1949). Mark Tobey. New York: Willard Gallery.
Tobey, M. (1964). Tobey. New York: Abrams.
Tobey, M. (1981). Northwest visionaries: Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, Leo Kenney. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art.
Tobey, M. (1984). Mark Tobey prints. San Francisco, Calif: The Association.
Tobey, M. (1998). Closeness of distance: Khmer sculptures and Mark Tobey paintings. Milano: Emil Mirzakhanian.
Tobey, M., & Dahl, A. L. (1984). Mark Tobey, art and belief. Oxford: G. Ronald. ISBN 0853981795
Tobey, M., Fryberger, B. G., Cummings, P., & Kays, J. S. (1990). Mark Tobey, works on paper: from Northern California and Seattle collections, celebrating the centenary of the artist's birth, November 6-December 23, 1990, Stanford University Museum of Art. Stanford, CA: The Museum.
Tobey, M., & Thomas, E. B. (1959). Mark Tobey: a retrospective exhibition from Northwest collections : Seattle Art Museum, September 11 through November 1, 1959 : catalog. Seattle: The Museum.
Yao, M.-C., & Tobey, M. (1983). The influence of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy on Mark Tobey (1890-1976). Asian library series, no. 23. [San Francisco]: Chinese Materials Center. ISBN 0896446255

References

^ Mark Tobey 1890 - 1976. Museum of Northwest Art. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ Biography Mark Tobey (Automatically translated from French). Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ Mark Tobey. Namen der Kunst. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ "Tobey, Mark (1890-1976): The Old Master of the Young American Painting". The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State University. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ "Tobey, Mark 1890-1976: The Old Master of the Young American Painting". The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State University. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ Wehr, W. (2000). The eighth lively art: conversations with painters, poets, musicians & the wicked witch of the west. Seattle: University of Washington Press, pg. 45-55.
^ Mark Tobey 1890 - 1976. Museum of Northwest Art. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ Priscilla Long (July 17, 2002). "Mark Tobey paints the first of his influential white-writing style paintings in November or December 1935". The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History HistoryLink.org Essay 3894. NW Arts Encyclopedia: Nesholm Family Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-08-30.
^ Delores Tarzan Ament; Mary Randlett. Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art. University of Washington/MONA. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ "Review: "Mine are the Orient, the Occident, science, religion, cities, space, and writing a picture."", Vol 9, Issue 4, One Country The Online Newsletter of the Baha'i International Community Community, January = March 1998. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ "Tobey, Mark (1890-1976): The Old Master of the Young American Painting". The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State University. Retrieved on 2007-07-08.
^ Tobey, Mark (b. 1890 d. 1976) Mark Tobey to Windsor Utley, 1959. Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Retrieved on 2007-09-22.

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Mark Tobey

Born	December 11 1890(1890--) Centerville, Wisconsin
Died	April 24 1976 (aged 85) Basel, Switzerland
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Art Institute of Chicago
Movement	Abstract Expressionism Northwest School
Patrons	Zoe Dusanne
Influenced by	Teng Kuei
Influenced	Jackson Pollock

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Mark Tobey

Early years

Career

Early years

Mid-career

Later years

Awards

Posthumous individual exhibitions

Permanent collections

Influence on other artists

Style

Quotes

Bibliography

Further reading

See also

References

External link

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