I know very little about what is generally called “abstract” painting. Pure abstraction would mean a type of painting completely unrelated to life, which is unacceptable to me. I have sought to make my painting “whole” but to attain this I have used a whirling mass. I take up no definite position. Maybe this explains someone’s remark while looking at one of my paintings: “Where is the center?” *

Best known for a visual language inspired by Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, Mark Tobey spent much of his twenties studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and working in New York City. In 1917, Knoedler & Co., New York mounted the first solo exhibition of his work. A year later, Tobey converted to the Baha’i faith. Its teachings, emphasizing the oneness of all religions, all people, and all aspects of the world, had a profound effect on his artwork. In 1923, he took a job teaching art at the Cornish School and moved to Seattle, where he met and befriended Teng Kuei, a Chinese student at the University of Washington. Through him, Tobey learned about Chinese calligraphic and painting techniques, and his interest developed into an artistic passion. He spent the second half of the 1920s traveling in Europe and the Middle East and returned to the United States in 1929, just in time to be included in Alfred Barr’s Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

In the 1930s, Tobey traveled extensively in Asia and the Middle East. He returned to New York in 1938 and then settled back in Seattle, where he spent the next several years refining his “white writing” style. During this time, Tobey also developed his key concepts of “multiple space” and “moving focus.” In order to destroy what Teng Kuie described as the “hole in the wall” effect of Renaissance perspective, Tobey conceived of the canvas as a series of spaces, each of which had its own focal point. Together, these multiple spaces formed a compound composition, one unified by calligraphic forms scattered across the canvas. Tobey was thus able to avoid the potential monotony of all-over compositions while also presenting an analysis of space that offered a radical departure even from the shifting planes of cubism and expressionism.†

A 1944 show at the Willard Gallery brought Tobey national recognition, and his work began to appear in numerous venues. Not content to simply repeat a successful formula, Tobey turned to Sumi ink as a medium in 1957. He saw the choice of black forms as a logical complement to his previous use of white. In 1960, he participated in Documenta II in Kassel, Germany and then settled in Basel, Switzerland, where he stayed for the remainder of his life. Despite his life of constant travel, Tobey’s affiliation with the Northwest School helped to establish the region as an important art center in the United States. Through his ties to the Willard Gallery, his work was often viewed alongside and studied in the context of abstract expressionism. Like Richard Pousette-Dart, Tobey’s spiritual optimism and physical distance from New York City set him apart from his abstractionist contemporaries, but his interest in the expressive potential of the painted gesture echoed their own artistic concerns.

Our featured work, Ghost Town, is a large-scale oil on canvas from 1965, and it offers a striking example of Tobey’s innovative approach to composition. At first glance, a chaotic jumble of numbers, letters, symbols, and shapes seem to have been randomly scattered across a page. The heavy, brownish-black mass of brushstrokes pulls our eyes toward the lower left quadrant, implying that the composition may have a center after all, despite Tobey’s attempts to resist one. However, just as soon as we are pulled towards the monochromatic mass, blocks of it break off and lead our eyes back out into space. If there is a center in this universe of forms, it lacks a strong gravitational pull; it draws us in but just as quickly sends us away to explore the entire canvas. As our eyes attempt to follow the fast-dancing tracery of forms, we begin to understand Francis O‘Connor’s observation that Tobey’s canvases are less an overall composition than an “all over” composition; they “always [seek] a totally integrated layout”^†† The result is a painting without a center that nevertheless remains cohesive.

Given the dynamic energy of the composition, the title, Ghost Town, seems incongruous, even contradictory. A ghost town is empty; eerily devoid of life. The image conjured by the title seems better suited to the disconcertingly empty dreamscapes of Giorgio di Chirico or Eugene Berman. But there may be a stronger connection than we are initially led to believe. In di Chirico and Berman’s artworks, as in the ghost towns of Hollywood westerns, architecture serves as the reminder of an erstwhile human presence. In Tobey’s ghost town, writing is the imprint of a near-vanished human culture. A page of jumbled words, letters, and glyphs reverberates with the energy of former life and order now turned to chaos and ruins. Thus even the title of Tobey’s painting functions at a level of abstraction. Furthermore, what appear to be solid blocks of brown and black are actually translucent layers of pigmentation; oil on canvas masquerades as Sumi ink and wash on paper. Throughout the image, forms appear to be washed out, erased, redrawn. The overall effect is that of a palimpsest, an accumulation of writing and meaning over time. These ghostly traces of past hands, of glyphs and symbols, exist alongside contemporary European words/names such as “Bois” and “Herrn.”

In Ghost Town, Tobey gives us a series of unexpected twists and contradictions: a ghost town whose “architecture” is really language; ink wash that is actually oil; paper that is in fact canvas; and a de-centered, dynamic, but highly integrated composition. And just as he explores surface space while frustrating our impulse to read depth of field, so Tobey offers us an understanding of human history that is similarly without a central point of origin or distinct temporal planes. Our languages, our histories, our past and present spaces of living and being are all deeply interlaced and forever animate in this innovative, peripatetic work.

* Extract from a 1955 letter cited in Arthur L. Dahl, Mark Tobey: Art and Belief (Oxford: George Ronald, 1984), 36. http://www.bahai-library.org/bafa/t/tobey.htm (accessed July 2009).

^† William Chapin Seitz, Mark Tobey, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago (1980: Ayer Publishing), 27.

^†† Francis V. O‘Connor, “The Forms of Nature’s Fractions: Charles Seliger (1926-2009) and His Natural World,” Charles Seliger: A Memorial Exhibition, forthcoming exh. cat. (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, January 9-February 27, 2010).