About Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey was born in 1890 in Centerville Wisconsin and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He moved to New York in 1911, and then to Seattle in 1922 to teach at the Cornish College of Allied Arts. His first exhibition was in 1935 in the Seattle Art Museum. Tobey dies in 1976.

Mark Tobey was a painter of small abstract works which often contained underlying religious themes. Tobey was also an illustrator and muralist but is most well known for his "white writing" paintings that give the illusion of being expansive and much larger than they actually are. Tobey is classified within the Abstract Expressionists, but because he was immersed in Asian religion and European culture, he was in fact isolated spiritually and physically from its New York founders.