What Movement of Art Is Mark Tobeys Middle West 1929

Ane of the nigh highly respected American artists of the 1950s and 1960s, Tobey's proper noun is associated showtime and foremost with his so-called "white writing" paintings; a calligraphic style characterized past a field of intricate and delicate overlapping pale lines. It was a form of gestural abstraction designed to inspire a "higher land of consciousness" in the spectator and it would bring the artist numerous international plaudits and awards. Although in the Us Tobey'due south mindfulness was somewhat "outmuscled" by the action paintings of Jackson Pollock, his push button for an "all-over brainchild" gave rise to a spiritual style that amounted to a wholly unique visual language; quite independent of any one international schoolhouse or location. Indeed, Tobey was a legendary wanderer who travelled through the Americas, Europe and the Far East in search of the influences that would help him refine his highly personalized conception of abstract painting.

Biography of Marking Tobey

Childhood

Marking Tobey was 1 of iv children built-in to devout protestants, Emma Cleveland, a seamstress (who referred to Marker, her youngest child, as "the most restless young'un I ever had") and George Tobey, a builder and farmer. Earlier Marking reached school age, the Tobey Family unit moved from Centerville, Wisconsin, to country nearly Jacksonville, Tennessee, where his begetter planned to build a house and showtime a sugar cane plantation. Still, the lack of educational facilities for their children saw the family render north to Trempealeau, Wisconsin, a village of some 600 inhabitants on the Mississippi River. Tobey recalled an idyllic "barefoot" childhood spent angling, swimming and playing on the banks of the river: "My whole experience until I was sixteen was only purely nature", he said, "I remember when I saw a h2o spider and it brought downwards a bubble of air and placed information technology over its nest [it was] a magical and fantastic thing".

Tobey's school did not provide fine art classes simply he was often chosen as "blackboard illustrator" for his own and other year grades. According to historian and curator William C. Seitz, both his parents believed in the importance of creative action. Emma Tobey loved to make "wonderful rugs and things" while George "felt a real responsibility to encourage his younger son's talent". Indeed, Seitz described how Tobey "vividly remember[ed] the rounded forms of animals that George Tobey drew with a thick carpenter's crayon, or carved in Indian cerise pipestone" adding that George "also bought him tools of art, such as they were", and later, after the Tobey'due south had moved to Hammond, Indiana, "even sent him twelve miles to a few classes at the Art Found of Chicago".

The family unit had moved to the steel-manufacturing boondocks of Hammond in 1906. The voraciously curious Tobey, hitherto completely absorbed by the natural world, became newly absorbed by the electric lights and signs, the sheer diversity of buildings, and the spirit and diversity of urban life. Resisting his father's idea that he would apprentice as a builder, George paid for him to attend Saturday forenoon classes in watercolour and oil painting at the Constitute betwixt 1906-08. He was forced to abandon his studies when his father became unwell and could no longer afford to fees. However, Tobey fondly recalled his time there, for case, a teacher's criticism of a mural he was painting: "You can't have a pinkish sky in the West, information technology's also far from the sun" was the somewhat prosaic assessment. Seitz added that, "i professor, 'old Reynolds,' from whom Tobey had a criticism or two, showed real insight when he observed that his student had [already] been infected by 'the American handling bug' - that is to say he preferred flashy brush technique to the tedium of careful modeling".

Early on Training

In 1909 the Tobey family moved to inner-city Chicago and, two years later on, Mark Tobey took a job every bit a "blueprint boy" for Northern Steel Works where he learned technical cartoon. Having been fired past Northern Steel Works (for a lack of commitment) he was hired equally a aircraft clerk by Barnes Crosby Engraving Co., and was assigned to the art section where he proved a failure as a letterer and was fired once more. He next found work equally a dollar-a-week errand boy for an independent fashion studio. Here, however, Tobey showed off his talent for drawing and his pictures of "pretty girls' faces", which were added to catalogue illustrations, resulting in a six-fold salary increase. Seitz describes how "during dejeuner hours and after piece of work [Tobey] pored over The Sat Evening Post and other 'encompass daughter' publications [condign] so conversant with the styles of the illustrators that a detail was sufficient for him to recognize their brush mannerisms. His heroes were Harrison Fisher, Howard Chandler Christy, and J. C. Leyendecker who 'for sheer technique took the cake'". Tobey himself recalled that at this stage of his artistic development he was still absolutely certain that "the American daughter was the most beautiful thing you could put on canvas".

The Chicago Art Found had already introduced their young alumnus to "something of monumental light and shade of Raphael and Michelangelo and [of] Titian'southward color", and the "brilliant brushwork" of Sargent and Frans Hals. However, for Tobey it was the not bad chronicler of the Old American West, Frederic Remington, who, in his words, "flashed like a comet before my eyes". It was only when a senior colleague at the fashion studio encouraged Tobey to be more adventurous past suggesting he "paint something out of your own noodle" that Tobey took a keener interest in the techniques of the corking Renaissance masters. Only, as Seitz notes, the earliest influence on the "swirling, wavelike rhythms" that would be and then characteristic of Tobey's mature works, came when "an elderly Swiss friend, C.A.Schweitzer, took Tobey to a German bookstore where, in the magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend, he saw drawings and paintings by von Stuck, von Lenbach, and Leo Putz". Information technology was these artists who introduced Tobey to the "linear undulations and floriform naturalism of art nouveau".

Mature Menses

In 1911 Tobey arrived in New York Urban center where, having been turned down for a post at Pictorial Review, he obtained a freelance position as a fashion illustrator for McCall'south magazine. While in that location he paid for two private classes with the painter, printmaker and teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller. Between 1912 and 1917 he flitted betwixt New York and Chicago and began to recall outside commercial design past starting drawing from life, experimenting particularly with studies of the human effigy in motion and at rest. He held his starting time ane-man exhibition of 23 charcoal portraits of well-known figures - including the opera singer, Mary Garden, the French theater director, Jacques Copeau, and the writer and social activist, Muriel Draper - at Thou. Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1917. He as well earned coin as an interior designer (which included the "feature" of imitation tapestries) decorating the apartment of Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase.

Five years before (1913) Tobey had attended the International Exhibition of Modernistic Fine art in Chicago. The Armory Show, as it was better known, was the first major exhibit of modern art staged in the United States. Tobey was confused by Post-Impressionism in general and specifically by the Cubists. He referred to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No.two equally a "cluttered explosion", simply his interest in the European avant-garde had been pricked. By 1918, indeed, he had joined an artistic circumvolve that gathered at announcer Walter Arensberg'due south New York apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street. The "W Lx-Seventh group" included Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Human being Ray, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Marsden Hartley. Tobey's creative sensibilities became more and more attuned to modern forms of pictorial deconstruction and when he saw Duchamp's Nude Descending 5 years on, it had transformed in his mind'south eye from a "cluttered explosion" into a "wonderful abstraction". The profound claiming for Tobey became henceforward one of form in painting. "The only goal I can definitely remember", he told an interviewer after, "was in 1918 when I said to myself, 'If I don't do anything else in my painting life, I will smash form".

Tobey'southward portrait exhibition had been organized by Marie Sterner. It was she who introduced Tobey to the portrait painter Juliet Thompson, for whom he agreed to sit. Information technology was during those sittings that Thompson introduced him to the Bahá'í World Faith teachings (introduced into the US in the 1890s) of the oneness of humanity and the unity of all religions. Tobey visited a Bahá'í campsite in Maine stating later "I only got it [...] yous know, and I said: 'Well, this is the truth.' And then that was that". His conversion to Bahá'í had opened Tobey'south optics to the spiritual dimension of life in his fine art and his sense of being part of a single human being race was cemented when he, and his friend Janet Flanner (she would get a well-known writer for The New Yorker) stepped out onto the streets of New York City on Armistice Mean solar day (in November 1918). Carried along by the heaving crowds, Tobey felt "completely integrated with the mass spirit". It was his moment of epiphany that would dictate his worldview. Tobey railed confronting "the Renaissance sense of space and order", stating that pictorial compositions "should be freer and not so separated from the space effectually them". He added, "I really wanted to smash form, to melt it in a more moving and dynamic way [...] I wanted to smash this paradigm that was in space and I wanted to give the lite that was in the form in space a release".

While earning his living painting portraits (including several burlesque and vaudeville dancers) and making caricatures, some of which (including i of Lillian Gish with her hand in her oral cavity) were published in the New York Times, Tobey continued to experiment with very many fine art forms and influences. In 1922, following a brief and failed matrimony (details of which take remained obscure), Tobey relocated to Seattle where he taught at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, an internationally recognized regional schoolhouse influenced past the radical educational theory - a non-historic period-specific education method whose key principles were based on Independence of idea and a keen sensation of 1's learning environment - of Maria Montessori. The school's founder, Nellie Cornish, recalled her first impression of Tobey as being "a very timid, I would say frightened, young man, and a very uncertain 1". The Cornish School provided a studio for Tobey and urged him to be more confident in his painting abilities. It was only at present that Tobey belatedly made his "personal discovery of cubism" and the structural animation of space that, according to Seitz, "underlies most of his mature painting" and which allowed him to "run across solid objects [...] as transparent and metaphysical".

In time, Tobey gained a reputation in Seattle for being progressive in his didactics methods and for urging his students to trust in their intuitions. He was committed to a receptive method for teaching. Drawing on the attitude of his ain mother and father, Tobey advised uncertain parents to "Just give them [children] materials and exist interested in art yourselves" while he implored older students to "start with [your] imagination [and] leave and look at things [...] that volition stimulate your retentive retention and your retentive memory volition bring it dorsum in your imagination again".

In 1923, Tobey struck upwards a deep friendship with Teng Baiye, a Chinese painter and student at the Academy of Washington. Tobey gear up time bated to study Chinese calligraphy with Teng, discovering "that i could experience a tree in dynamic line as well as in mass and light". On one occasion, when Tobey was looking at a goldfish tank, Teng asked him why Western artists painted fish only when they are dead. "Those and a number of other remarks have been a not bad stimulus to me", recalled Tobey. (Many years after (in 1957), Tobey would ruminate that "if the West Coast had been open to artful influence from Asia, as the East Coast was to Europe [then] what a rich nation [America] would be!".)

It had non been lost on Tobey that while living in New York he had only to "leave Grand Key Station [to experience] the broad sweep of mountains, sea, and woods surrounding the city" whereas "psychologically the only leave from Seattle [...] was toward Alaska". Tobey was in fact influenced by the "etching, weaving, and painting of the Northwest Coast Indians", but in his search for new visual and cultural experiences, Tobey prepare out on the first of his extended overseas travels throughout Central Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near and Far East. Having visited Barcelona, Greece, Constantinople, Beirut, and undertaken a pilgrimage to the tombs of Baha'u'llah in'Akka and 'Abdul-Baha in Haifa, he spent the summer and autumn of 1926 in Paris. He devoted many hours studying the masterpieces in the Louvre and besides attended Gertrude Stein'due south salon where he further explored the Cubist works of Georges Braque (whom he met) and Pablo Picasso. It was too at Stein's salon that Tobey came into contact with André Masson'south Surrealist "automated writing" technique.

In the fall of 1928, Tobey taught a three-week studio grade at Emily Carr'south studio in Victoria, Canada. He inspired Carr to explore the means by which forms in nature could be reduced to geometric shapes and thereby evoke spiritual ideas. Carr was, all the same, ambivalent to Tobey's "clever and beautiful" work; "He knows a lot and talks well", she said, only his work still "lacks something". Upon his return to Seattle, Tobey cofounded the Costless and Creative Art School. In 1929, Alfred Barr Jr, director of the recently opened Museum of Modern Fine art in New York, spotted Tobey's piece of work in Romany Marie'south famous Greenwich Village Café Gallery (the catalogue referred to him as a Surrealist) and invited him to take part in the MoMA exhibition Painting and Sculpture past Living Americans. The American modernist Marsden Hartley noted that with Tobey "a new American quality appeared", adding that Tobey "reveals what he has seen and felt, and he has seen clearly, and felt with special gravity the depths of the tides that launder against the barricades of the human spirit. Tobey is a clairvoyant, a revealer of the content of shapes, and he finds a consistent harmonic synthesis for these revelations". In the first major article written on Tobey, meanwhile, Muriel Draper referred to his work as "intellectualized philosophy in pigment".

In 1931, Tobey responded to an invitation to teach at Dartington Hall in England, a progressive school and cultural center run by the heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight and her husband, the agronomist Leonard Elmhirst. Dartington was a hotbed of new thinking - attracting writers including Aldous Huxley, Pearl Buck, and Arthur Waley - where Eastern thought combined with modernistic theories near the relationship of nations and people to each other, to the environment, and to civilisation. Tobey would go Dartington's about influential and longest serving member of staff, returning in that location repeatedly from his travels (funded past Straight and Elmhirst) to United mexican states, the U.s. and the Orient, over a period of viii years. By all accounts, he was a remarkable instructor. The painter and ceramist Bernard Leach, with whom Tobey enjoyed a lifelong friendship, recalled how he instructed his pupils to "get out your boards - trip the light fantastic! Let get! That'south improve - trip the light fantastic, you emotionally tied-up English! Now stand upwardly and dance with your chalk on your cartoon boards".

In 1934, Tobey and Leach travel together to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Leach went on to Japan, while Tobey remained in Shanghai, living with family and friends of Teng Kuei. Tobey was dazzled by the congestion, the traffic, the dance halls, the dark-time fizz and the neon signs of the city, which reminded him of New York. After Shanghai, Tobey retreated to Japan where he was at present seduced past its quietness and simplicity. Much of his fourth dimension in Kyoto was spent practising and watching the sport of archery. He spent a month at a Zen monastery well-nigh Kyoto where he skilful meditation and had the time and infinite to observe tiny events in nature, the effects of water and lite on grasses, seeds and lichen. On one occasion, he was given a freely brushed, sumi ink painting of a big circle upon which to meditate. As Seitz stated, the "circle of emptiness" released Tobey from "the domination of others' ideas; and he took as his own the Japanese emphasis on conservation and concentration, simplicity, directness, and profundity".

When Tobey returned to Dartington in the fall of 1935, his calligraphy studies led to an unexpected development in his painting when he spontaneously created a small work, in tempera on paper-thin, made up of a continuous, tangled mesh of white lines. A few nights subsequently, he painted Broadway, translating his memory of New York into a swirling, pulsing calligraphy, expressing his personal experience of the nightlife of the city. His "white writing" fashion was born, "in gentle Devonshire during the nighttime, when I could hear the horses animate in the field", he afterward remembered. "In the procedure I probably experienced the nigh extraordinary sensations I take ever had in art, because while i function of me was creating these two works, some other part was trying to hold me back. The old and the new were in boxing. It may be difficult for i who doesn't pigment to visualize the ordeal an artist goes through when his affections of vision is existence shifted".

Afterward Period

In 1938, following a long journey throughout Turkey, and with mounting tensions building towards war in Europe (making it difficult to return to England), Tobey decided to remain in Seattle. During this time, his work became more than complex, as he tried to develop his "calligraphic impulse" to capture everything he plant seductive about the urban center. He spent three years studying the people in Pike Place Public Marketplace, producing numerous ink sketches and paintings, that treat the market every bit a microcosm of humanity. He besides devoted himself to music, learning the piano and the flute, studying music theory, and composing his ain works.

The art dealer Otto Seligman became Tobey's exclusive representative in Seattle, while he established a significant relationship with the New York gallery owner Marian Willard who affording the creative person, who was at present pushing his "all-over" painting style to its limits, several exhibitions throughout the 1940s. His 1944 exhibition (at the Willard Gallery) was the kickoff to show his "white writing" paintings and proved a major success. National recognition followed. According to fine art historians Thomas Williams and Hannah Tuck, Tobey'south work revealed to Jackson Pollock "the furthest potential of painting beyond a limiting notion of space, when every inhibition of the 'hole in the wall' had been expunged and when every vestige of representation had been condensed to its synthetic signature on the flat surface of the canvas". In his review of the 1944 exhibition, the infamous New York critic Clement Greenberg had in fact described Tobey equally making "ane of the few original contributions to contemporary American painting". Yet despite his initial enthusiasm, Greenberg was to conclude that Tobey's painting was "non major. Its mode, which consists in dividing and subdividing within a very narrow compass of sensations, gives the creative person as well petty room in which to vary and amplify", he wrote. In his mission to constitute Pollock every bit the great protagonist of American modernism, Greenberg had effectively deleted Tobey from the narrative of all-over abstraction.

Tobey's temperamental and geographic distance from the "heroic and confrontational" New York School; and the small-scale, overtly spiritual delicacy of his work (non to mention his background in commercial illustration) all counted confronting him. Merely contrary to Greenberg's misgivings, Pollock did in fact advise that Tobey was proof to the lie that New York was "the only identify in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru (sic)". Reviewing Pollock's first show at the Parsons Gallery in early 1948, i writer for Fine art News fifty-fifty dismissed Pollock's paintings as "[l]ightweight [...] a perverse echo of Tobey's fine white writing" while Tobey himself expressed anger at others riding on the back of his own innovations, saying of Pollock that he only "took my stuff and enlarged it".

Despite his estrangement from the New York Schoolhouse, Tobey'south international acclaim grew throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In 1948 he participated for the showtime time in the Venice Biennale, and the following year in a symposium at the San Francisco Museum of Art with Marcel Duchamp and Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1951, Tobey spent 3 months as a guest critic of graduate students' work at Yale at the invitation of Josef Albers. His first retrospective show took place at the Whitney and the California Palace of the Legion of Laurels in San Francisco.

In Seattle, Tobey was considered the elder of a loose association of artists, identified in a 1953 Life magazine article as the "Mystic Painters of the Northwest". Tobey, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, and Morris Graves were grouped together as the founders of the "Northwest School", with their commonage "mystical feeling toward life and the universe, their sensation of the overwhelming forces of nature and the influence of the Orient". Co-ordinate to the art historian Patricia Junkar, "Tobey'south white writing was a revelation to Graves [and had] showed him the way to paint the very spirit of nature". Simply Graves's appropriation of Tobey's "white writing" led to a cooling of the two men's relationships. "Without my ideas he would exist nothing," Tobey said of Graves. "He used to come up here dark after night ... lie on the floor, ask me to prove him my work, and pore over my paintings. Study them [and steal them] Similar a thief in the dark".

By 1954, the French art critic, Michel Tapie, was singling out Tobey, along with the German painter, Wols, every bit one of the leading representatives of Art Informel. Meanwhile, Tobey traveled to Basel and Bern in Switzerland. In 1955 Jeanne Bucher, the French gallery owner, gave Tobey his kickoff solo exhibition in Paris. The next yr he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and he received a Guggenheim International Honor. The award coincided with Tobey's new explorations in Sumi ink paintings.

In 1958, Tobey, alongside Mark Rothko, represented the Usa of America at the XXIX Venice Biennale where, out of some 3,000 works exhibited that year, his painting Capricorn was awarded, the Premio del Commune di Venezia. Not since James Whistler'due south Niggling White Daughter - Symphony in White, No.11 triumphed at the showtime Venice Biennale in 1895, had an American artist won the golden medal. Tobey won the first Art in America award in the same year.

In 1960, having go disillusioned with the politics of the American art scene, and encouraged to do so by the gallery owner Ernest Beyeler, Tobey emigrated, with his companion Pehr Hallsten and secretary Marking Ritter, to Basel, Switzerland. There he lived a most-monastic life but he never ceased working, experimenting constantly with the scale of his paintings and embracing new techniques such every bit gold leaf, engraving and lithography. The prestigious international exhibitions continued and Tobey was awarded the unprecedented accolade of a solo exhibition at the Louvre'south Museum of Decorative Arts in 1961. Prestigious solo presentations followed at The Museum of Modern Fine art, New York, in 1962, and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1966. Past the cease of the 1960s Clement Greenberg had even reversed his stance on Tobey. Equally Pop Fine art and Minimalism superseded Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg was magnanimous enough to concede that, "Tobey wears amend and better in general; his truth seems to be enhanced by the contrast with it made by the 'impact' art of the sixties".

Tobey did not return to New York or Seattle afterward 1970. His health was in turn down post-obit a middle attack in 1968 and a subsequent gall bladder operation. He was subject to a major career retrospective at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1974 but Tobey was not well enough to attend. He would remain in Basel until his death on April 24, 1976.

The Legacy of Mark Tobey

Tobey's art has often been cited as having an influence on Tachisme and Art Informel. Simply he has informed the practice of an impressively long list of individuals, all of whom have admit a debt to him. He exerted a profound influence on Seattle's "Northwest School" with next generation Northwest artists, like Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson, all acknowledging a deference to Tobey. In New York, the Abstract Expressionist Norman Lewis took much conceptually and aesthetically from Tobey while expressing his own identity with influences drawn from his African American culture. The composer and artist, John Cage, who described him as "our own, an American Picasso", cited Tobey equally having a "great issue on my mode of seeing, which is to say my interest with painting, or my interest with life even".

Meanwhile, Tobey's enduring friendships with Bernard Leach has seen his Bahá'í influences extended to Leach's neighbour in St. Ives, Cornwall, the painter Bryan Wynter. Wynter changed his mode radically after seeing Tobey's piece of work in 1956 at London's Tate Gallery. Artist Lyonel Feininger enjoyed a particularly long and creative exchange of ideas with Tobey, stating that he establish Tobey's work "breathtakingly expressive and beautiful [that creates a] truly elevated feeling of satisfaction, humility [...] spiritually and formally" while for the Russian sculptor and pioneer of Kinetic Art, Naum Gabo, Tobey's painting was "nearer to music than anyone else'south in the field of abstract art". Even afterwards Tobey's passing, his work connected to affect upon pioneering artists. None more than and then than Keith Haring who, following his arrival in New York in 1978, cited Tobey, Pollock and Klee every bit the artists who inspired him to elevate his work above subway cartoons to create his bold and distinctive style.

Simply maybe the best summing-up of his achievements belongs to Seitz who wrote the following: "In the geography of ideas, he came from nowhere. His speech, mannerisms, and many of his tastes are Midwestern. Much of his subject thing is equally Yankee, in its own style, as that of Sheeler, Hopper, or Curry. He is the founding principal of the 'Northwest School' of painting. Yet at the same time Tobey may well be the most internationally minded painter of importance in the history of art. What could improve illustrate his increasing internationalism than the evolution of his idea of line and brush? It began with the ornamental embellishments of Harrison Fisher and other comprehend-daughter specialists, progressed to Jugendstil and the bravura of Sargent and Sorolla, expanded to include Hals, and finally came to cover most of the globe's calligraphic fine art, and great Eastern masters like Liang K'ai and Sesshu. What an unprecedented fusion of perspectives!"

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/tobey-mark/

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