TOBEY, MARK

* 11.12.1890 Centerville, † 24.4.1976 Basel

Mark Tobey was born in Centerville, Wisconsin in 1890. From 1906 to 1908 he attended courses in oil and watercolour painting at the Art Institute in Chicago. In 1911 Tobey moved to New York, continued to teach himself painting and drawing, and earned his living as a fashion illustrator, portraitist, and caricaturist.

From the time of his conversion to the Bahai faith in 1918, the meditative scriptural exercises and pictorial worlds of the Far East increasingly influenced his compositions. From 1925 Tobey began to travel, with visits to Paris and the Middle East. A longer trip took Tobey to China and Japan, where he closely studied Zen teachings and painting, as well as calligraphy, in a Zen monastery. From the 1940s onwards, Tobey produced his famous White Writings, which present a network of fine marks inspired by calligraphy.

Tobey's international breakthrough came in 1958 when he won the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. Although Mark Tobey never lost contact with the country of his birth, he finally moved to Basel in 1960, where he died in 1976.