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Mark Tobey was born in 1890 in Centerville, Wisconsin, near the bay where Trempeleau, as he says, "in caves in the cliffs we look down on the Mississippi, a mile wide and in islanding the center. Between the river and the caves are the Indian mounds, rounded shapes full of fantastic objects ever found .... "
As a young man working in Chicago, Tobey layouts and admired fashion illustrators such as Christy, Charles Dana Gibson and Fisher. Then he saw the Sorolla exhibition at the Art Institute and found Sargent, Zorn, Zuloaga. He briefly studied at the Art Institute, but it was mostly an autodidact, immersing himself in the study of the great artists of the past.
In 1911, Tobey went to New York, where he spent much of the next decade. His first recognition as an artist came in 1917 when he presented a series of portrait drawings in New York. In 1923 he went west, settled in Seattle and taught at the Cornish School. He went to Europe in 1925, lived in Paris, visited the Middle East, then returned in 1927 to split his time between Seattle, Chicago and New York.
From 1931 to 1938 Tobey has served as artist-inresidence at Dartington Hall in South Devon, England, where he painted a mural. During these years he continued to travel, Europe, Mexico, back in Seattle, and finally, in 1934, Japan and China. In Shanghai, he studied with his friend Teng Kwei and learned the rhythm and movement of the Chinese brush, 'pressure and release. Each movement, as the tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for himself. "A series of paintings with motifs of birds, snakes and the moon was made in Shanghai and later presented to the Museum Art in Seattle.
Back in Seattle in 1935, Tobey painted Broadway Norm, a small tempera that pointed out the direction of his mature style, using for the first time the "white writing" that locks, masks and reveals the calligraphic form of a continuous based on the Chinese brush. Lyonel Feininger called white writing "writing ... a painter who has created a new convention of his own, which is not yet included in the history of painting." White writing was wonderfully adapted to prove a subject that has moved many Tobey - the electric night of American cities.
Tobey worked on the Federal Art Project in Seattle in the late 1930s. Through the 1940s he lived in Seattle, where he had a profound influence on the quiet, but the young painters. Price with CS from Oregon, he was credited as the founder of modern painting in the northwest. Tobey has held a major retrospective in 1951 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1954-55 he lived in New York and Paris and held one-man shows in Berne, Paris and London.
Tobey: A tribute to all the artists I've ever known. For those parties, perhaps more than a name anonymous, and those who gave anonymously in mind ... For oriental masters and Pacific winds and tides, and the giant sequoias ... to quiet streets and buzzing cities. For the person who inspired the images of the Red Man now looking at me with eyes wide open through the glass, looking beyond the conquered lands - not just the hum of the winged arrow, and then the silence surrounding mystic word now meaningless. Not to be named or numbered, all, or recall, except that no eyes when you look through a window. What am I, but all this - all at times, or in part, still hanging split, not sure, as in a game still to play. No artist has ever existed without roots ...
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