Copyright
2017 Mark Tobey / Seattle Art Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York –
courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Venice Biennale Special
Peggy
Guggenheim Collection
Mark Tobey – Threading Light
At the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Mark Tobey: Threading Light, until September 10th is
curated by Debra Bricker Balken. It is is the first
comprehensive retrospective of the American artist’s work in twenty years. The
exhibition traces the evolution of the artist's groundbreaking style and his
significant yet under-recognized contributions to abstraction and mid-century
American modernism.
Mark Tobey - Wild Field – 1959 - Tempera on board
Photo by Larry Novak - Courtesy Arthur Lyon Dahl
“We hear some artists speak today of
the act of painting . . . but a State of Mind is the first preparation and from
this action proceeds. Peace of Mind is another ideal, perhaps the ideal state
to be sought for in the painting and certainly preparatory to the act.”
Mark Tobey – 1958
Mark Tobey – 1958
Mark Tobey in his studio – 1949
Copyright 2017 Mark Tobey / Seattle Art
Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Mark
Tobey - Untitled – 1944 - tempera on paper
Alvin
E. Friedman-Kien and Ryo Toyonaga collection
With 70
paintings spanning the 1920s through 1970, Mark
Tobey: Threading Light surveys the breadth of Tobey's oeuvre and
reveals the extraordinarily nuanced yet radical beauty of his work. One of the
foremost American artists to emerge from the 1940s, a decade that saw the rise
of abstract expressionism, Mark Tobey (1890–1976) is recognized as a vanguard
figure whose "white-writing" anticipated the formal innovations of
New York School artists such as Jackson Pollock.
Judith Dolkart, Allison Kemmerer, Philip Rylands and Debra Bricker Balken
Copyright
2017 Mark Tobey / Seattle Art Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York
Mark Tobey - Lines of the City – 1945 - Tempera on
paper
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy,
Andover, MA, bequest of Edward Wales Root, 1957.36
When Tobey’s small paintings composed of intricate, pale webs of delicate lines
were first exhibited in New York in 1944, they generated much interest for
their daring "all-over" compositions. His unique calligraphic renderings
largely invoke the city—its dizzying, towering architecture, thoroughfares, and
pervasive whirl of electric light. As such, they are the outcome of a lyrical
combination of both Eastern and Western visual histories that range from
Chinese scroll painting to European cubism. This unique form of abstraction was
the synthesis of the artist’s experiences living in Seattle and New York, his
extensive trips to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kyoto, and Europe, and his conversion
to the Baha'i faith.
“Within
this mix of sources, Tobey was able to skirt a specific debt to cubism—unlike
his modernist peers—by fusing elements of like formal languages into
compositions that are both astonishingly radical and beautiful."
Debra Bricker Balken
copyright 2017 Mark Tobey / Seattle Art Museum,
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Mark Tobey – World – 1959 - Tempera
on paperboard
Private collection, New York
Private collection, New York
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