Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey, (December 11, 1890, Centerville, Wisconsin, U.S.—April 24, 1976, Basel, Switzerland) was an American painter whose experiments with abstract, calligraphic work influenced Abstract Expressionism. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tobey worked for a time as a fashion illustrator and portraitist in New York City. He converted to the Bahāʾī faith in 1918 and from that point on explored non-Western spirituality. When he visited East Asia in 1934, spending one month in a Zen monastery in Kyoto and studying Chinese Chinese calligraphy in Shanghai, he began to develop his mature painting style. The influence of calligraphy first became evident in the tangled brushwork of his city scapes of the 1930s. He went on to develop a unique style consisting of a web or network of calligraphic marks painted in white against a gray or coloured ground. This “white writing” soon displaced all realistic representation in his work. Tobey’s works are small in size, compared with the standards of 20th- and 21st-century American art, and their primarily water-color, tempera, or pastel surfaces distinguishes them from those of his contemporaries. His use of an all over, abstract, linear network in his art foreshadowed the works of Jackson Pollock.