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Contact: Cara Egan,
SAM Public Relations
(206) 748-9285;
email: PR@SeattleArtMuseum.org
Exhibitions Provide a Rare Glimpse into the Art and Life of Mark Tobey
SEATTLE, November 8, 2002 – A survey of paintings by Northwest mystic Mark Tobey (1890 – 1976) will be on view in Mark Tobey: Smashing Forms and Mark Tobey and Friends from Nov. 16 through April 6, 2003 on the Seattle Art Museum’s fourth floor. The paintings are drawn exclusively from the museum’s permanent collection showcasing the great range and diversity of Tobey's work while also presenting works from his circle of friends, admirers and artistic inspirations in the Northwest, on the East Coast and in Europe.
Mark Tobey: Smashing Forms spans Tobey’s entire career and includes more than 50 paintings ranging from 1935 – 1975. In the adjoining gallery Mark Tobey and Friends includes works by Lyonel Feininger, Helmi Juvonen, Paul Horiuchi, Mark Rothko, Marsden Hartley, Windsor Utley, Tobey’s companion Pehr Hallsten, and many others. SAM is the repository of the Mark Tobey Estate and many of the paintings in the show were given to the museum by the artist himself or his close friends. Although Tobey traveled and moved around constantly, he considered Seattle his home.
Lisa Corrin, SAM’s Deputy Director for Art/Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, curated the exhibitions and is displaying several Tobey paintings from the museum’s permanent collection, some of which have rarely been exhibited together. The last major Tobey exhibition at SAM, Tobey at 80, was held in 1970 for the artist’s 80th birthday.
Several of Tobey’s famous “white writing" paintings will be on view including Serpentine (1955) which is often considered one of his masterpieces. His “white writings” consist of an overlay of white or light-colored calligraphic symbols on an abstract field which is often composed of thousands of tiny and interwoven brush strokes. This method, in turn, gave rise to the type of "all-over" painting style made famous by Jackson Pollock, another American painter to whom Tobey is often compared and is rumored to have influenced. In these exhibitions, Corrin has placed Pollock’s Sea Change (1947) directly across from Tobey’s Parnassus (1963) so visitors can easily compare their two styles.
Other Tobey paintings in the exhibition include Farmer’s Market (1941) which depicts an active Pike Place Market crowd scene and Still Life with Egg from 1941, a tiny painting that shows the cubist influence on his work. A striking Tobey self-portrait (Self Portrait, 1949) seems to be looking around the gallery at his circle of friends, contemporaries and admirers in the Mark Tobey and Friends gallery.
“We are thrilled to present one of the finest collections of our own Mark Tobey at SAM downtown,” says Corrin. “This exhibition spans his entire career and demonstrates that Tobey was truly in the vanguard of modernism internationally.”
Mark Tobey: Smashing Forms and Mark Tobey and Friends are the latest exhibitions that highlights the art of the Northwest. Prior to Mark Tobey, SAM presented Morris Graves in Seattle. Both exhibitions are adjacent to the Documents Northwest: the PONCHO Series, creating a suite of galleries exploring the art and influences of the Pacific Northwest. Opening concurrently with Mark Tobey on the fourth floor is newest Documents Northwest: the PONCHO Series featuring the powerful and monumental photographs of Anthony Hernandez from Idaho and Los Angeles, CA.
Mark Tobey - Short Biography
Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin in 1890 and as a young man, he moved to Chicago and worked as an illustrator by day, attending the Chicago Art Institute by night. In 1911, he moved to New York's Greenwich Village and took up charcoal portrait drawing. Tobey was given his first one-man exhibition of portrait drawings at M. Knoedler & Co., New York in 1917. One year later, a key event occurred in Tobey's life when he converted to the Baha'i World Faith. This, along with his later study of Zen Buddhism, formed the philosophical basis for most of his work.
In 1923 Tobey moved to Seattle and obtained a teaching position at the Cornish School of Allied Arts. Although Tobey was a restless traveler for most of his life, Seattle became his home. His first year in Seattle, he met Teng Kuei, a Chinese student at the University of Washington who first introduced Tobey to Chinese brushwork and exposed him to the elegant grace of oriental calligraphy.
From 1931 to 1938, he became an artist-in-residence at Dartington Hall, a progressive school in Devon, England. There, he met such intellectual leaders as Aldous Huxley and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian mystic. In 1934, Tobey traveled to the Far East, first studying brush painting in Shanghai and then going on to Japan. A month-long stay in a Zen Buddhist monastery, meditating and studying calligraphy, proved to be the turning point in his artistic focus.
Tobey came back to Seattle convinced that "we have to know both worlds, the Western and the Oriental." To build a bridge between the two, he developed his “white writing” technique of calligraphy that looped skeins of light paint against a dark field, with lines that formed neither letters nor recognizable subjects, yet filled the space with a sense of movement and depth. Like the surrealists, he tried to "penetrate the mind and clear away all rational processes in an effort to get at the inner recesses of experience." Tobey was the pioneer in blending elements of occidental and oriental art in his low-key, mystical, calligraphic paintings. For all their quiet unpretentiousness, his works had an impact on much of what followed in modern American art, in particular, the explosive energy of abstract expressionism.
Tobey became the first American since James Abbot Whistler (1834-1903) 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 in Paris, an extraordinary tribute to the work of a living artist. These landmark 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 Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Tobey died in 1976 in Switzerland.
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