Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin on 11 December 1890 and spent his youth in the American Midwest.

He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. His inclination and love for drawing were evident even as a boy, when he produced magazine covers and drawings for catalogue illustrations. He left Chicago in 1911 to move to New York, Greenwich Village, to attempt a career as a fashion designer and for 10 years (1911-21) worked as an illustrator and interior decorator.

From 1922 in Seattle, he became interested in Chinese painting and calligraphy and in 1925 he moved to Paris.

Travels in the Orient and his White Writing technique

He subsequently travelled to Europe and the Near East (where he studied Chinese calligraphy in Shanghai), settling in England between 1931 and 1938, but continued to travel to China and Japan.

He returned to the United States in 1939.

His pictorial language is highly personal, on canvases of small dimensions, with subtle handwriting and tending to be of a single colour, work that he calls White Writing.

The Fifties and Consecration

In 1956 he was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and received the Guggenheim International Award.

In 1958 he won the ‘Città Venezia’ Award for painting at the Venice Biennale, while in 1961 he was the first American painter of whom the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris organised a solo exhibition.

In 1960, he settled in Basel where he continued his pictorial research, creating works of subtle signs alternating with frenetic marks of great expressive force.

In 1974 the ‘National Collection of Fine Arts’, a department of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, organised an exhibition of 70 of the artist’s works for the exhibition Hommage à Mark Tobey.

He died in Basel on 24 April 1976.