Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey ( born December 11, 1890 in Centerville, United States, † April 24, 1976 in Basel, Switzerland ) was an American painter.
Mark Tobey is considered a pioneer of the American "Abstract Expressionism". Of its Far Eastern painting and calligraphic art are known influenced White Writings, works executed in bright colors with abstract filigree, network-like structures in mixed media.
Life
Mark Tobey moved in 1906 from Trempealeau (Wisconsin ), where he had spent his childhood in the Chicago area. In Chicago, he attended classes at the Art Institute and worked as an industrial designer in an iron and steel plant. In 1911 he changed his residence to New York City, where he pursued portrait painting and worked as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and other magazines. In 1918 he participated in the Bahai religion.
In 1922, he moved to Seattle and was there until 1925 a teacher at Cornish College of the Arts. The Chinese artist Teng Kwei introduced him to the techniques of Chinese painting. From 1925 to 1927 he lived in Paris and traveled extensively in the Middle East. In Devonshire in the UK he taught from 1930 to 1938 at the Dartington Hall School. In 1934 he took a trip to China and then to Japan, where he stayed for several months in a Zen monastery. After Seattle, he came back in 1939. By 1944 he was a solo exhibition with White Writing Paintings in the Willard Gallery in New York in America to the well-known artist.
With the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale of 1958, he also got a high international reputation. 1959 and 1964 he took part in documenta II and documenta III in Kassel. After the Swiss Galerie Beyeler had bought 40 works by him, he settled down in 1960 with his friend Pehr Hallsten in Basel.
Mark Tobey was one of many artists who belonged to the circle of the art collector and patron Theodor Ahren mountain.
Some pictures of the series text Urologies the famous French painter Jean Dubuffet have a striking resemblance to Tobey White Writings. When the art collector Jean Planque Dubuffet in 1960 drew attention to was this shocked and remarked: " One is never alone ... ". Conversely believed Tobey front of a painting of Dubuffet to have plagiarized his paintings on.