MARK TOBEY'S WHITE WRITING

MARK TOBEYS WHITE WRITING

by Joan K. Yanni

Prarirre Red

Mark Tobey’s Prairie Red (69.43) is a somewhat mysterious painting, having little to do with prairies or with red—though there are some red tones in the background and in the curved calligraphic-like brush strokes on its surface. At first glance the painting seems flat; but as we look, the surface comes forward and the background recedes, as though the curved lines are floating above dark space. The calligraphic “white writing” created by Tobey gives the work an oriental feeling.

The work was painted in 1965 in tempera on paper.

Mark Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin, in 1890, and grew up in various towns in the Midwest. His only formal art training was at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he went on weekends while he was in high school. The family moved to Chicago in 1909, where, because of his father’s illness, Tobey had to give up his studies and find work. His interest in art continued, and even when not taking classes, he frequented the Art Institute, where he was especially attracted to Italian Renaissance paintings and to the works of Hals, Sargent and Sorolla y Bastida. 

In 1911 he moved to New York where he worked as a fashion illustrator for McCall’s Magazine. He returned to Chicago in 1913, still working as a fashion illustrator but developing a reputation for portrait drawings in charcoal. Though he was talented enough to show his portraits in a one-man exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, he did not decide immediately to pursue an artistic career, but began working as an interior decorator.

In 1918 he converted to the Bahá’i faith, which teaches the unity of all religions and the spiritual bond between nature, art, science and personal life. It promotes the abolition of racial and religious prejudices, the equality of sexes, and universal education, as well as the progressive revelation of God through a series of prophets. Bahá’i had a deep and permanent effect on him.

Tobey moved to Seattle in 1922, where he taught at the Cornish School, experimented with the overlapping technique of Cubism, and met the Chinese painter Deng Kui, who taught him the rudiments of Chinese calligraphy. Dissatisfied with his work and looking for new challenges, he traveled to Europe, visiting the Louvre and meeting Gertrude Stein and her circle.

During 1931-38, after the onset of the Depression threatened his teaching job in Seattle, he took a position as resident artist at Dartington Hall, a progressive school in Devonshire, England. Here he met literary figures such as Aldous Huxley and Rabindranath Tagore who furthered his interest in Asian art, literature and mysticism. While at Dartington he regularly traveled to Asia and the near East, studying Persian drawing and further investigating calligraphy with Deng Kui in Shanghai. His travels included a stay at a Zen Buddhist monastery in Kyoto.

                                                                                                   

His work up to this point had been figurative, but as early as 1935 he began making paintings consisting of an intricate series of white, curving lines with flashes of color showing through. With a painting entitled Broadway (1936) he began to abandon both the use of traditional perspective as well as the multiple perspectives of Cubism. Broadway creates the illusion of space and lights flashing at night in Manhattan’s theater district through quick, mostly white, brush strokes over a dark, multi-colored background. He had begun to create a world of space through the movement of linear and circular lines over a dark, abstract background. His “white writing,” though derived from calligraphy, was used as a decorative part of his paintings rather than a representation of actual symbols.

Throughout the 1940s he developed his “white writing” in such works as Red Man, White Man, Black Man and E Pluribus Unum, both designed to show the unity among individuals in keeping with the Bahá’i tenets. The “white writing” in the paintings seems to connect the barely perceptible human figures in parts of the canvas.

Tobey’s use of an overall calligraphy anticipated American abstract expressionism and no doubt influenced Jackson Pollock, who almost certainly had seen Tobey’s all-over coverage of his canvases, although Tobey painted while Pollock poured. Though he interacted with members of the New York School, Tobey remained an individualist with personal vision and oriental mysticism inherent in his work.

After continuous travel between New York, Seattle and Europe, in 1960 Tobey decided to settle in Basel, Switzerland, where he remained until his death. His later career was built on dynamic light, space, and motion. In response to museum pressure, he increased the size of his paintings, but his style remained constant.

Toward the end of his life, Tobey won international acclaim for his work.  He became the first American since James McNeill Whistler to win the Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale, an award he won in 1959. In 1961 he had a retrospective showing at the Louvre, an extraordinary tribute to a living artist. These achievements were followed by a major exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1962 and in 1974 another major show at the National Gallery in Washington. He died in Basel in 1976.

Tobey said of his work, “My sources of inspiration have gone from those of my native Middle West to those of microscopic worlds.” He also pointed out that from the study of calligraphy he discovered an “impulse that has opened out new horizons for my work. Now I could paint the turmoil and tumult of the great cities, the intertwining of the lights and the streams of people caught up in the mesh of their net.”

Source: Curatorial files, Grove Dictionary of Art, E, P. Dutton, publisher, Encyclopedia of American Art.