Mark Tobey
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MARK TOBEY was born in 1890 in Centerville, Wisconsin, near Trempeleau Bay where, as he says, "from caves in the bluffs one looks down upon the Mississippi a mile wide and islanded in the center. Between the caves and the river are the Indian mounds, rounded forms full of fantastic objects never found. . . ."
As a very young man working in Chicago, Tobey did fashion layouts and admired such illustrators as Christy, Charles Dana Gibson and Fisher. Then he saw the Sorolla exhibition at the Art Institute and discovered Sargent, Zorn, Zuloaga. He studied briefly at the Art Institute but was chiefly self-taught, immersing himself in study of the great artists of the past.
In 1911 Tobey went to New York, where he spent much of the next ten years. His first recognition as an artist came in 1917 when he exhibited a series of portrait drawings in New York. In 1923 he went west, settled in Seattle and taught at the Cornish School. He went to Europe in 1925, lived in Paris, visited the Near East, then returned in 1927 to divide his time between Seattle, Chicago and New York.
From 1931 to 1938 Tobey held the post of artist-inresidence at Dartington Hall in South Devon, England, where he painted a mural. During these years he continued to travel, in Europe, to Mexico, back to Seattle, and finally, in 1934, to Japan and China. In Shanghai he studied with his friend Teng Kwei and learned the rhythm and movement of the Chinese brush, the "pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself." A series of paintings with bird, snake and moon motifs was done in Shanghai and later shown at the Seattle Art Museum. Back in Seattle in 1935, Tobey painted Broadway Norm, a small tempera which pointed the direction of his mature style, employing for the first time the "white writing" which encloses, masks and reveals form in a calligraphic continuity based on the Chinese brush. Lyonel Feininger has called white writing "the handwriting of a painter who . . . has created a new convention of his own, one not yet included in the history of painting." White writing was to prove wonderfully suited to a subject that has moved Tobey greatly--the electric night of American cities.
Tobey worked on the Federal Art Project in Seattle in the late 1930's. Through the 1940's he lived in Seattle, where he had a quiet but profound influence on younger painters. With C. S. Price of Oregon, he had been credited as a founder of modern northwest painting. Tobey held a large retrospective exhibition in 1951 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1954-55 he lived in New York and Paris and held one-man shows in Berne, Paris and London.
Tobey : Homage--to all the artists I have ever known. To those gone, closer perhaps through a name than the nameless ones, and to those who gave anonymously to the spirit. . . . To the Oriental masters and to the Pacific winds and tides, and the towering Sequoias. . . . To quiet streets and the hum of the great cities. To that which inspired the Red Man's images now looking at me with wide open eyes through glass, gazing beyond to lands not conquered--only the whir of the feathered arrow, then silence surrounding the mystic word now meaningless. Not to be named or numbered, all these, or remembered except as when one gazes eyeless through a window. For what am I but all these--whole at times, or in part, fractioned yet clinging, not sure, as in a game yet playing. No artist ever existed without roots. . . .
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