Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey – Early years as fashion illustrator; meeting with Juliet Thompson

Mark Tobey was born on 11 December 1890 in Centerville, USA, the youngest of four children in a Congregational Church family. His father, a carpenter and builder, occasionally carved animals for his children out of stone and paper, awakening Mark Tobey’s early artistic interest. He did not receive a solid schooling in this field, but took several weekend courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and was largely self-taught. From 1911, he first worked as a fashion illustrator for the women’s magazine McCall’s, but never lost sight of his goal to have a career as an artist, with his first exhibition at Knoedler & Company in 1917. The American painter Juliet Thompson - who modelled for him – introduced Tobey to the Baha’i faith, a universal religion with roots in Persian Babism. This encounter had a powerful effect on the entire life of the artist and redirected his interest. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mark Tobey was active as an art pedagogue and art teacher in Seattle and England.

Breakthrough with calligraphic abstractions of New York

Mark Tobey was a passionate traveller, visiting Mexico, China, Japan, and various European countries, among others. He gathered important experiences on these trips which had a decisive influence on him as a person and artist. He not only converted to Bahaism, but also felt strongly attracted to the Asian art of calligraphy, spending several months in a Zen monastery in Japan. Artistically, he made the transition from figurative representation to abstraction in the 1940s. His first small-format paintings, featuring his characteristic net structure, drew great attention from the New York art world from the start – New York also served as the basis and starting point for the innovative works, which ultimately represented a translation of the cityscape into abstract calligraphic compositions. In 1944, Tobey met Lyonel Feininger, with whom he remained friends, and he also belonged to the circle of artists around the collector and patron Theodor Ahrenberg. The international breakthrough brought him representation at the Venice Biennale in 1958 where he won the International Prize for Painting. 

The White Writings as artistic signature

With the White Writings, Mark Tobey created an iconic series of works which are immediately associated with him. Interestingly, however, his artistic calling card bears a striking resemblance to the series Texturologies by the French painter Jean Dubuffet. For a time, both artists believed the other to have plagiarised him –in reality, however, they had both reached a similar epiphany spatially and temporally independent of each other. Although Mark Tobey received far more recognition in Europe that in his native USA, he is nevertheless considered the founder of the American Northwest School. The extent to which his art influenced the later work of Jackson Pollock is disputed among researchers. 

Mark Tobey died in Basel, Switzerland, on 24 April 1976.