Mark Tobey
Invented white writing after studying calligraphy in a Zen monastery, and spent his last years in Basel.
Mark Tobey was born in Wisconsin in 1890, converted to the Baha'i faith in 1918, and spent a month in a Zen monastery in Kyoto in 1934 studying calligraphy and meditation. What came out of it was white writing: all-over surfaces of small, pale, calligraphic strokes covering the entire picture with no centre and no hierarchy, arrived at years before Pollock's drip paintings and often cited in arguments about who got there first. He taught at Dartington Hall in England, worked in Seattle, won the painting prize at the Venice Biennale in 1958, and died in Basel in 1976.
Tobey worked small and mostly on paper in tempera, gouache and ink rather than on canvas, and that is the shape of the market: the works are intimate, the surfaces are matt and unvarnished, and light damage, foxing and mount-burn are the principal condition faults. The white writing works of the 1940s and 1950s lead. The market is spread between the United States, Switzerland and Japan. There is a print output in lithograph and etching from the 1960s and 1970s, published in modest editions.
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