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MARK TOBEY (1890 – 1976), his artist quotes on painting art + biography facts of the American painter, famous for his ‘white writing’ as a very subtle kind of Abstract Expressionism, meant in a spiritual way. Tobey was a senior painter of the “mystical” painters of the Northwest. He was strongly influenced by the Baha’i religion, so his art had the meaning to have a spiritual expression. On the bottom you find short biography facts. -  editor, Fons Heijnsbroek.

MARK TOBEY, his artist quotes on painting art - by the senior painter in American Abstract Expressionism / the Northwest School

- 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. * Mark Tobey, source of his artist quotes on abstract American painting art of the Nord West: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60. (American painter with quotes on life and art, famous for his ‘white writing’ and the Baha’i religion; more biography facts at the bottom) 

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- I have sought a unified world in my work and use a movable vortex to achieve it. * source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60

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- Our ground today is not so much the national or the regional ground as it is the understanding of this single earth. The earth has been round for some time now, but not in man’s relation to man, nor in the understanding of the arts of each as a part of that roundness. As usual we have occupied ourselves too much with the outer, the objective, at the expense of the inner world wherein tie true roundness lies.. ..America more than any other country is placed geographically to lead in this understanding., and if from past methods of behavior she has constantly looked towards Europe, today she must assume her position, Janus-faced, toward Asia, for in not too long a time the waves of the Orient shall wash heavily upon her shores. All this is deeply related with her growth in the arts, particularly upon the Pacific slopes. Of this I am aware. Naturally my work will reflect such a condition and so it is not surprising to me when an Oriental responds to a painting of mine as well as an American or an European. * source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60

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- Every artist’s problem today is: What will we do with the human? * source of his art quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60

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- Every artist’s problem today is: What will we do with the human? * Mark Tobey, source: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 61

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- Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol. * Mark Tobey, source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 62

                                                 ***** - An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms. * Mark Tobey, source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60. (biography facts at the bottom of the page)

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- We all feel a separateness; we wish that a drop of water would soften our ego; the world needs a common conscience: agreement.. ..we must concentrate outside ourselves. * source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 64

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- England collapses, turns Chinese with English and American thoughts. Thousands of Chinese characters are turning and twisting; every door is a shop. The rickshaws jostle the vendors, their backs hung with incredible loads. The narrow streets are alive in a way that Broadway isn’t alive. Here all is human, even the beasts of burden. The human energy spills itself in multiple forms, writhes, sweats and strains every muscle towards the day’s bowl of rice. The din is terrific. * Mark Tobey, source: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 65

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- I am accused often of too much experimentation…, but what else should I do when all other factors of man are in the same condition. I thrust forward into space as science and the rest do. * source of his artist quote on experimentation in his painting art:: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 65

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- My first lesson in relativity: …we had a still life set-up to paint. Suddenly I saw that the pitcher was so big (his hands outside the shape of a pitcher, then close in) and the glass was so big. From that time on everything was all right. (remembering his Saturday morning painting class, f.h.) * Mark Tobey, source: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 65

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- On the third floor of Manning’s Coffee Shop in the Farmer’s Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows (an equivalent of the picture plane). Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window ( a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull’s flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage.. .. It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognisance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography. (Italics by Seitz, f.h.) * Mark Tobey, source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 68

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- I have just had my first lesson in Chinese brush from my friend and artists Teng Kwei. The tree is no more solid in the earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized. All is in motion now.. .. One step backward into the past and the tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all rhythm, lifting, springing upward. * source of his artist quote on the Chinese brush painting technique: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 68

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- I have many ideas for lights. I will paint only lights at night. (on the twinkling city-lights, fh) * source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 68

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- …white lines in movement symbolize a unifying idea which flows through the compartmented units of life bringing the consciousness of a larger relativity. (statement concerning his painting ‘Threading Light’) * source of his quote: “Abstract Expressionism”, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 68

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- At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit. * source of his Tobey’s quote: quoted in ‘Willem de Kooning’, MOMA Bull, pp. 7, 6                                                  ***** - The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up. (in conversation with Seitz, fh). * source of his artist quote on Cubism painting in: “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America” W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 68

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- …two men dressed in white jeans with white caps on their heads.. .. climbing over al large sign of white letters. Of course, the words spell something, but that is unimportant. What is important is their white, and the white of the letters… * source of Tobeys artist quote on white: ‘Reminiscence and Reverie’, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, October 1951, p. 227

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- The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up. (in conversation with Seitz, fh). But there was escape, too, even in those days, for there was (the painter, f.h.) Whistler living in the grey mists with a faded orange moon. The nocturne transformed itself into dreamy rooms with Chopin’s music creating a mood that softened the hard core of self. * source of Tobeys art quote on Whistler: ‘Reminiscence and Reverie’, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, October 1951, pp. 228, 231

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- We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit. * source of artist quote on Abstract Expressionism painting: a Statement in his Bahai lecture, Oct 30, 1951, as quoted in “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 104

                                                 ***** - …It is Fall. The leaves are being raked under the great elms darkening in the evening light. Slowly they become weighted with darkness. Across the river they are burning the grass on the Minnesota bluffs. Myriads of colored streamers reflect in the river blow… * source of his written nature impression of Fall: ‘Reminiscence and Reverie’, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, (October 1951) p. 230

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- We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain. * Mark Tobey, source of artist quote on the relation of Nature and painting: ‘Reminiscence and Reverie’, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, (October 1951) p. 231

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- …there has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We’ve just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex. source of his artist quote on Cubism another isms: ‘The Tigers Eye 1, Mark Tobey’, 1952; as quoted in “Abstract Expressionist Painting in America”, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 103

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- Now it seems to me that we are in a universalizing period… …If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us. And I would say that we are in a period when we are discovering and becoming acquainted with these idioms for the first time. * Mark Tobey, source of his artist quote on a universalizing world and modern time, in Abstract Expressionism: “Modern Artists in America’’, R. Motherwell, A. Reinhardt and B. Karpel, First series, New York 1952, p. 28.

 Mark Tobey – short biography information on the senior artist in American Abstract Expressionism

Mark Tobey was a famous painter of the ‘North-West school’, a subtle variant of American Abstract Expressionism. As a youth, Tobey studied art for a brief period at the Art Institute of Chicago 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 Knoedler & Company, in lower Manhattan, New York City, in 1917. In 1918, Tobey came in contact with New York portrait artist and Bahá’í Juliet Thompson (also an associate of Khalil Gibran) and posed for her. During the session Tobey read some Bahá’í literature and accepted an invitation to Green Acre where he converted. In the following years, Tobey delved into works of Arabian literature and teachings of East Asian philosophy and with his conversion led him to explore the representation of the spiritual in art.

In 1929, Tobey was a juror for the Northwest Annual Exhibition. In the same year, he had the show that marked a change in his life: a solo exhibition at Romany Marie’s Cafe Gallery in New York. Alfred H. 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 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 the Baha’i Faith. 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).

In 1932 Tobey went to Mexico and in 1934 to China and Japan – where he deals with the teachings and paintings of Zen, the Hai-Ku poetry and also calligraphy in a monastery in Kyoto. The effects of these journeys can be observed in his works. The artist returns to the USA in 1937 because of the changing political situation in Europe. He lives in Seattle until 1960. He makes first music compositions as of 1938. In 1944 the Willard Gallery in New York shows his “White Writings” pictures for the first time, this exhibition marks his artistic breakthrough. Tobey covers the image carrier with many layers of white or a similarly light color – this is the beginning of the “all over” painting, a style that is also applied by other artists such as Jackson Pollock. Mark Tobey’s works become more and more abstract and comply with the artist’s meditative and contemplative lifestyle.

Mark Tobey’s works are shown in the 1959 and 1964 Documenta exhibitions in Kassel and in numerous other exhibitions all over the world. He belongs to the most important precursors of the American “Abstract Expressionism”. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington shows the first retrospective in 1974. Mark Tobey moves to Basel in 1960 where he dies on April 24, 1976. editor, Fons Heijnsbroek