Mark Tobey (1890-1976) "attributed To" Oil On Canvas Monumental Period 70s-75s

Monumental work attributed to the American painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976). Oil on white canvas on stretcher. Dimensions: 270cmx200cm. Healthy paint layer. Period: 70s/75s. Very good general condition. With an American box frame. Other photos on request.

Imbued with a mysticism that characterized all of his work, this work whose Semitic caligraphy inspired by oriental culture in particular, and mixed with symbols, reaches its fullness here: in the intertwined field of integral painting and abstraction gesture...

Private collection. France. Visible by appointment in Loire Atlantique.


Mark Tobey

Having studied Chinese calligraphy and Zen painting, he developed from 1935 a meditative painting made up of a swarm of signs.

Mark George Tobey was born in 1890 in Centerville (Wisconsin). In 1893 his family moved to Chicago. After attending the art institute there from 1906 to 1908, he moved to New York in 1911, where he worked as a portrait painter and fashion designer. He had his first exhibition in 1917 at the Knoedler Gallery.
Tobey converted in 1918 to the Baha'i religion. After divorcing, he moved to Seattle in 1922, met in 1923 Teng Kuei, a Chinese student and painter, who introduced him to calligraphy and taught art until 1925, then traveled to France (Paris, Châteaudun ) and in Catalonia (Barcelona), Greece, Constantinople, Beirut, Haifa, where he is interested in Arabic and Persian writing.
In 1927, Tobey returned to Seattle and in 1928 helped found the Free and Creative Art School. In 1929 Alfred Barr exhibited his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1930 to 1937 he settled in Devonshire, teaching at Dartington Hall School.
He becomes a close friend of the famous potter Bernard Leach, who was also on the faculty. Introduced by Tobey to Baha'ism, Leach converted. During this period, Tobey traveled to Europe but also to Mexico in 1931, to Palestine in 1932. In 1934, to study calligraphy and painting, he stayed in China with Teng Kuei then in Japan at the Kyoto Zen monastery. Back in 1935 in England he painted, in November or December, several canvases (Broadway, Welcome Hero, Broadway Norm) in a "White writing" which will be the essential characteristic of his work and which, according to critics, will have a decisive influence on Jackson Pollock's itinerary.
In 1939 Tobey returned to Seattle, studied piano and music theory, developed his calligraphic experience in 1942, exhibited in New York in 1944 and 1951, in Paris, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, in 1955. In 1956 he received the Guggenheim International Award, presented a retrospective exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 1958 and won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale.
Tobey painted a fresco for the National Library in Washington in 1959, moved to Basel in 1960, received the first prize from the Carnegi Institute in Pittsburgh in 1961 and exhibited in Paris at the Museum of Decorative Arts. In 1962 the Museum of Modern Art organized a new retrospective of his work. In 1966 he traveled to Haifa and Madrid where the visit to the Prado marked him deeply. He exhibited in New York in 1967, at the Dallas Museum in 1968, at the Hervé Odermatt Gallery in Paris (with Avigdor Arikha, Balthus, François Heaulmé, Giorgio Morandi and Serge Poliakoff), at the Washington Museum in 1974.
Mark Tobey, who has been called "the old master of young American painting", died in Basel in 1976, aged 85.