Biography from AskART:
| A painter of small abstract works with underlying religious themes as
well as illustrator and muralist, Mark Tobey remains known primarily
for his "white writing" paintings that give the impression of being
expansive and much larger than they actually are. Tobey is
sometimes categorized with the Abstract Expressionists, but in fact he
was isolated spiritually and physically from its New York founders
because of his immersion in Asian religion and major time spent in
Europe and the Pacific Northwest.
Encountering the Bahai World
faith in 1918 and later Zen Buddhism was pivotal to Mark Tobey's life
and work in which he expressed themes of oneness and progression. As a
result of his obvious commitment to spiritual aspects of painting, he
has had a prestigious reputation as a modernist but is perhaps more
appreciated in Europe and Asia than in America. Of modern American art,
he said: "There have been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, . . . we
have just been confused by the storm. . . we forget that there are
today great men in the religious field with as much to offer. .
.religion like science must be balanced to bring men to a state of
equilibrium and that and that only will bring peace." (Herskovic 338)
Mark
Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin, and raised in the Midwest,
lived in Indiana and Chicago where he briefly attended the Art
Institute School. He worked as a commercial illustrator, and from 1911
to 1922, worked in New York City where he did fashion illustration and
caricature for "McCalls" magazine and other publications. He also took
private lessons from Kenneth Hayes Miller.
With a keen
interest in philosophy and religion, especially beliefs of the Orient
and Middle East, Mark Tobey's official affiliation with non-western
religions began in 1918 when he converted to the Bahai faith and joined
their World Church. Then between 1923 and 1931, he lived in several
places including Seattle, Paris, New York City and Chicago. In Seattle,
Tobey studied Chinese brush-work with Teng Kuei. From 1931 to 1938, he
lived in England, where he was resident artist at the progressive
school, Darlington Hall, near the town of Darlington. After that, until
1960, when he moved to Basel, Switzerland, Mark Tobey lived in Seattle
where he was close to persons of Asian culture.
His painting
subjects included portrait and genre scenes, but after 1935, he
developed his signature technique of "white writing", described by
scholar Matthew Baigell as a "tangle of thin, continuous linear
strokes" linked to Oriental calligraphy and created from his desire not
to be bound to realistic form. "For him, the white lines symbolized
light as a unifying idea which flows through the compartmental units of
life." He avoided focal points in his paintings and let the lines blur
so that the overall canvas became a symbol "of the unity of forms and
movements in the universe rather than an example of traditional
organization hierarchies in which dominant elements brought lesser ones
into subordination." His paintings reflect substance but not solidity,
a sense of "cosmic wholeness, suggesting matter, space with nonspace
and indivdual stroke with the totality of the pictorial field".
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, "Dictionary of American Art", pp. 354-355
Marika Herskovic, Editor, "American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s"
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Mark Tobey is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Abstract Expressionism
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