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by Mark Tobey , 1971]] Mark George Tobey ( December 11 , 1890 – April 24 , 1976 ) was an American Abstract Expressionism Painter , born in Centerville, Wisconsin . Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the others. Friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Along with Guy Anderson , Kenneth Callahan , Morris Graves , and William Cumming , Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School . http://www.museumofnwart.org/collection/nwartists_detail.html?id=28 retrieved 2007-07-08 EARLY YEARS Tobey was the youngest of four children born to George Tobey, a carpenter and house builder, and Emma Cleveland Tobey -- his mother was over 40 when Tobey was born. The Tobeys were devout from 1906 to 1908 , but like the others of the Northwest School, Tobey was mostly self-taught. In 1911 , he moved to New York where he worked as a fashion illustrator for McCall's magazine and made some money as a portraitist. His first one-man show was held at M. Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1917 . In the following years, Tobey delved into works of Arabian literature and teachings of East Asian philosophy with the consequence that he joined the Baha’i Faith in 1918 , which led him to explore the representation of the spiritual in art.http://www.mark-tobey.com/ retrieved 2007-07-08 CAREER Early years Tobey's arrival in Seattle in 1922 was partly an effort for a new start following his short marriage and divorce. When the ex-wife found's Tobey's address, she sent him a box of his clothes topped with a copy of Rudyard Kipling 's ‘’The Light That Failed’’.http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5217 retrieved 2007-07-08 In 1923 , Tobey met Teng Kuei , a Chinese painter and student at the University Of Washington , who introduced Tobey to Eastern penmanship, beginning Tobey’s exploration of Chinese calligraphy. Tobey went to , where he spent one winter, and to Barcelona and Greece . In Constantinople , Beirut and Haifa , he studied Arab and Persian writing. When Tobey returned to Seattle in 1927 , he shared a studio in the ballroom of a house near the Cornish School with the teenaged artist Robert Bruce Inverarity , who was 20 years Tobey's junior. From a high school project of Inverarity's, Tobey became sufficiently interested in three-dimensional form to carve some 100 pieces of soap sculpture. In 1928 , Tobey co-founded the Free And Creative Art School in Seattle. In in New York. Alfred Barr. Jr. , then a curator at the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), saw the show and selected several pictures from it for inclusion in MoMA's Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans exhibition, which opened in 1930 . In 1931 , Tobey sailed on the Britannia to England, to teach at Dartington Hall, in Devon . There, he was resident artist of the ‘’Elmhurst Progressive School.’’ In addition to teaching, he painted frescoes for the school. He became a close friend of noted potter Bernard Leach , who was also on the faculty. Introduced by Tobey to Baha'i, Leach also became a convert. Tobey's travels during this period included Mexico (1931), Europe, and Palestine (1932). In 1934 , Tobey and Leach traveled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company. Leach went on to Japan, while Tobey remained to visit Teng Kuei, his old friend from Seattle, before going on to Japan. Japanese authorities confiscated and destroyed an edition of 31 drawings on wet paper that Tobey had brought with him from England to be published in Japan. No explanation for their destruction has been recorded; possibly they considered his sketches of nude men pornographic. Only a few sets remain in existence. Tobey spent late June and early July in a Zen monastery outside Kyoto to study Hai-Ku poetry and calligraphy before returning to Seattle that autumn. The significance of Tobey’s Baha’i Faith in relation to his art is something that Tobey himself acknowledged on many occasions, including in 1934 when he wrote: ::"The root of all religions, from the Baha’i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one - that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value... Mine are the Orient, the Occident, science, religion, cities, space, and writing a picture." Mid-career In 1935 , Tobey held his first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum . He yo-yoed from New York to Washington, D.C. to Alberta, Canada, back to England, and to Haifa to visit the principal shrine of Baha'i. Sometime in November or December, at Dartington Hall, working at night, listening to the horses breathe in the field outside his window, he painted a series of three paintings, ’’Broadway’’, ‘’Welcome Hero’’, and ‘’Broadway Norm’’, in the style that would come to be known as "white writing" (an interlacing of fine white lines). Tobey expected to continue teaching in England in 1938 , but the mounting tensions of war building in Europe kept him in the United States. Instead, he began to work on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project, under the supervision of Robert Inverarity, the young friend he met 11 years before. In June 1939 , Tobey attended a Baha'i summer school and overstayed his allotted vacation time. Inverarity dropped him from the WPA project. Fortunately, paintings he had done on the project were included in a WPA exhibition that August, where they were seen by Marian Willard , who operated an art gallery in New York. The Arts Club Of Chicago held solo shows of Tobey’s work in 1940 and 1946 . By 1942 , Tobey's process of Abstractionism was accompanied by a new calligraphic experiment. In 1944 , Tobey’s show at the Willard Gallery , New York brought him success, the catalogue prefaced by Sidney Janis . In 1945 , Tobey gave a solo exhibition at the Portland Museum Of Art , Oregon . Tobey studied the piano and the theory of music with Lockrem Johnson , and, when Johnson was away, with Wesley Wehr in 1949 introduced to Tobey by their pianist friend Berthe Poncy Jacobson . Wehr was just an undergraduate at the time, but he accepted the opportunity to serve as a stand-in music composition tutor for Tobey and over time became friends with Tobey and Tobey’s circle of artists, becoming a painter himself, as well as a chronicler of the group. 1951 was a busy year. Tobey showed at the Whitney Museum of New York; on the invitation of Joseph Albers , Tobey spent three months as guest critic of graduate art-students’ work at Yale University ; and Tobey’s first retrospective was held at the palace of the Legion Of Honor in San Francisco . In , Tobey traveled to Paris and presented a solo show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris; then traveled to Basle and Bern . In 1956 , Tobey returned to Seattle, was elected at the National Institute Of Arts And Letters , and received the Guggenheim International Award. In 1957 , he began his Sumi ink paintings. He became the first American since James McNeill Whistler to win the Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale, an award he won in 1959 . Later years The artist settled in Basel, Switzerland in 1960 , and in September took part in Vienna ’s Congress of the International Association of the Visual Arts on the topic “The East - Occident”. In 1961 , Tobey won first prize at the Carnegie International , Pittsburgh ; and became the first American painter ever to exhibit at the Louvre 's Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. Solo presentations of Tobey’s work were held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1962 , and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1966 . In the same year, Tobey traveled to the Baha'i world center in Haifa , then visited the Prado in Madrid . In 1967 , Tobey shows at the Willard Gallery , New York. In 1968 , Tobey receives the distinction of "Commander, Arts and the Letters of the French Government". In the same year, he had a Retrospective show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In 1969 , Tobey painted a mural fresco for the national Library Of Congress in Washington, D.C.. Another major retrospective of the artist’s work took place at the National Collection of Fine Arts, a part of the Smithsonian , in Washington, D.C. in 1974 . Tobey would have liked to remarry, but he didn't. He lived for 25 years with Pehr Hallsten , in Seattle and Basel. Hallsten died in Basel in 1965, while Tobey died there on April 24 , 1976 .Wehr, W. (2000). ''The eighth lively art: conversations with painters, poets, musicians & the wicked witch of the west.'' Seattle: University of Washington Press, pg. 45-55. POSTHUMOUS INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS
PERMANENT COLLECTIONS At least 5 of his works are in the permanent collections of the and internationally, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Tate Gallery in London , the Museum Of Modern Art in New York , the Metropolitan Museum Of Art , and the Whitney Museum Of American Art . INFLUENCE ON OTHER ARTISTS
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