Background

Mark Tobey was born on December 11, 1890, in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, United States. He was the first-born into a family of George Baker Tobey, a carpenter and builder, and Emma Jane Cleveland who lived in a Centerville community. Tobey’s parents were adherents of segregationalism. They had three more children.

When Mark was three years, the family relocated to Chicago.

Education

Supported by the parents in his passion for art, Mark Tobey was inscribed at the classes of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906. The couple of years he spent at the institution were the only formal artistic training he received. As for the rest, he was an autodidact painter.

In addition to art, Tobey was also fascinated by music. In 1940, he took piano and flute lessons from an American composer Lockrem Johnson who also taught him the theory of music.

Career

Mark Tobey’s career started in 1911 when he became a fashion illustrator at McCall's Magazine in New York City. The six following years the artist travelled between New York City and Chicago earning his life as an illustrator, portraitist and designer of interiors. The first solo exhibition of the artist was organized in 1917 at Knoedler Gallery where he demonstrated his charcoal portraits.

Four years later, Tobey relocated to Seattle, Washington where he joined the teacher’s staff of the Cornish School of Arts (currently Cornish College of the Arts). It was in the city where he met his Chinese colleague Teng Kuei who continued to meet his new friend with Eastern philosophy and calligraphy. To enrich his knowledge and discover the cultures of other countries, Tobey went to the first of his lifelong trips.

He visited France, Spain, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and Japan. While in Kyoto, he explored Japanese Zen painting, haiku poetry and calligraphy. Tobey came back to Seattle in 1927 and shared a studio with the young artist, Robert Bruce Inverarity, not far from the Cornish College of the Arts. A year later, he took part at the creation of the Free and Creative Art School and then worked as a teacher at Emily Carr's studio in Victoria.

After the solo show at the Arts Club of Chicago, Mark Tobey had several exhibitions which contributed to the development of his professional career. In 1929, he demonstrated his canvases at the Romany Marie's Cafe Gallery in New York City. The curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr., was so impressed by Tobey’s art that he invited him to present his paintings at the show titled ‘Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans’ organized in 1930 at the Museum.

Tobey pursued his teaching activity in Devon, United Kingdom where he came in 1931 to teach at the Dartington Hall. During eight years the artist spent in the county, he also worked on the murals for the institution and travelled a lot to Europe, Mexico and Palestine. While travelling, he enlarged the circle of colleagues and finally developed his distinctive manner dubbed ‘white writing’. The first examples of the style became a series of three paintings, Broadway, Welcome Hero and Broadway Norm. Beware of the war building in Europe, Mark Tobey left the United Kingdom and returned to the United States at the end of the 1930s.

The artist participated in the Federal Art Project for some time and during the following decade developed further white writing, movable space, and moving focus. City themes, especially those of New York, followed in the 1930s and 1940s. It was the time of the national recognition for the artist. The peak of Tobey’s career was marked by such important exhibitions as the shows at Willard Gallery in New York City in 1944, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon the following year and the Arts Club of Chicago in 1946.

He also showed his art at the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Arts Club of Chicago and Detroit Institute of Arts. The exhibitions at Willard Gallery became regular. In 1948, Mark Tobey participated at Venice Biennale. It was the first one of three further shows in 1956, 1958 and 1964. Three years later, Tobey had two large retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The same year, he was invited by Josef Albers as a guest critic of graduate students' art at Yale University. In 1955, the artist brought his paintings to the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

At the beginning of the new decade, Mark Tobey relocated with his partner to Basel, Switzerland where the artist lived till the end of his days. Tobey devoted all his time to art. He participated regularly in art shows in the United States, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Germany and France. The most important of the last exhibitions were the retrospectives at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts) within the Louvre in 1961 and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C in 1974.

Achievements

• 

  Mark Tobey was an accomplished painter whose art is widely recognized around the world. His successful attempt to unite Western traditions in painting with Eastern philosophy contributed to the development of abstract art. He was among the founders of the Northwest School.
  
  Tobey’s art has influenced and continues to influence many artists, including famous Jackson Pollock, one of the representatives of so-called ‘all-over’ painting style.
  
  During his lifetime, he received such prestigious awards as Guggenheim International Award, Carnegie International Exhibition First Prize and Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government. He was the second American artists after James Abbott McNeill who received the International Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale.
  
  The walls of the reception hall in the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme institution of the Bahá'í Faith, are decorated by four of Tobey's signed lithographs. Other works by the artist can be found in permanent collections around the world, including of the Museum of Northwest Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Gallery in London and others.
  
  In 2011, a ‘White and Rose’ painting by Tobey was purchased at Christie's in London for $742,041.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Electric night

  • Untitled Sumi

  • Calligraphy

  • Lovers of Light

  • Two Men Walking

  • Aerial Centers

  • Blue Composition

  • Washington

  • Screenshot

  • Bahai Scene

  • To Life

  • Message from a Desert Star

  • American Landscape

  • Landscape

  • Childs Fantasy

  • Fire Dancers

  • Pike Street Market

  • Ancient Empires

  • Self-portrait

  • Autumn Field

  • Louvre

  • Winter Leaves

  • Patterns of Conflict

  • New World Dimensions IV

  • Sonata

  • Sentinels of the Field

  • Forest Fire

  • Canticle

  • Crystallizations

  • After the Harvest

Religion

Raised in a devout family, Mark Tobey developed an interest to religion, God and spirituality. He was introduced to Bahá'i Faith by the artist Juliet Thompson who was its adept.

Views

Throughout his life, the artist was also concerned with the questions of man and nature.

Quotations: "An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms."

"Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol."

"We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement.. ..we must concentrate outside ourselves."

"We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit."

"Now it seems to me that we are in a universalising period.. .If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us. And I would say that we are in a period when we are discovering and becoming acquainted with these idioms for the first time."

"We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain."

"Problems are an important part of maturing - meet them straight on. Work them out. It's like the chick in the egg. It has to break through the eggshell on its own. That's how it gains its first strength. If you break the shell for the chick, you end up with a puny little runt."

"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."

"I am accused often of too much experimentation.. ..but what else should I do when all other factors of man are in the same condition. I thrust forward into space as science and the rest do."

"At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit."

"I have sought a unified world in my work and use a movable vortex to achieve it."

"On pavements and the bark of trees I have found whole worlds."

Membership

In 1960, Mark Tobey denied the election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  1956

Interests

• travelling, Eastern philosophy, music

Connections

The first marriage of Mark Tobey ended in divorce in 1921.

At the end of 1930s, the artist met Pehr Hallsten who became his companion.

Father:

George Baker Tobey

Mother:

Emma Jane Cleveland

companion:

Pehr Hallsten

(From left to right) Pehr Hallsten, Mark Tobey and Wesley Wehr.

Friend:

Bernard Leach

mentor:

Lockrem Johnson

Friend:

Teng Kuei

colleague:

Juliet Thompson

References

• Mark Tobey: Art and Belief A book by Arthur L. Dahl.
  1984
• Northwest Mythologies: The Interactions of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson The catalog offers two extensive essays by curators Sheryl Conkelton and Laura Landau, who draw on letters, interviews, and new analyses of the artists' works to investigate their mutual interaction
  2003
• Mark Tobey: Museum of Modern Art A book by William Chapin Seitz
  2011
• Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye The first book to explore artistic and intellectual exchanges between Chinese artist Teng Baiye and his American contemporary Mark Tobey
  2014
• Mark Tobey: Threading Light The first comprehensive monograph on Mark Tobey traces the evolution of this artist’s groundbreaking style and his significant yet under-recognized contributions to abstraction and midcentury American modernism
  2017