White Night

Date1942

Maker Mark Tobey American, born Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890; died Basel, Switzerland, 1976

Label TextSeattle in the1940s was, for Tobey, alive with snap and crackle. The city at night was a blaze of neon and filled with the palpable excitement of crowds coming and going, a mass of people exuding their own kind of dynamic force field. “When I’d go downtown at night . . . I’d always feel crowds coming, there were so many people,” Tobey remembered. Music, theater, commerce—all enterprise thrived in the night now. The luminous night world of Seattle inspired in Tobey visions of human ingenuity, creativity, and energy expanding—forces that he depicted in painting as a network of brilliant white lines.

The . . . white writing series [of] . . . paintings are varying attempts at a type of modern beauty I only find in the delicate structures of airplane beacons and electrical transformers and all that wonderful slender architecture connected with a current so potent and mysterious.

– Mark Tobey, to his friend and dealer Marian Willard, 1946

The visualization of night and light evolved in the art of Mark Tobey in the early 1940s from what was for him a heightened sensitivity to the impulses of the modern world. His motivation, he declared, was to paint something felt, not something seen: the energies of the modern city at night, for instance, and those indefinable force fields whose radiance is only detected in the dark, sparkling energies that, while potentially explosive, might also suggest human intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. Tobey's distinctive approach to painting came to be called "white writing"—an obsessive, dense, calligraphic style that seems akin to ancient symbolic expression, like characters scratched into the surfaces of black obsidian or clay tablets. Tobey's white lines on dark surfaces perfectly convey forces that are familiar to us all—like meteor showers in the night sky, for example—and that we appreciate as some of the most ravishing and mysterious occurrences in nature. "His surfaces are worked with brush strokes that can be explosively bold, but are most often as delicate as the strands of a spider web or as ephemeral as smoke rising from a cigarette," is how one critic described Tobey's ethereal abstractions.

What do we see and feel in Tobey's White Night?

Object number62.78

ProvenanceThe artist; possibly as a gift to his friend Berthe Poncy Jacobson (1894-1975), Seattle, Washington, by 1945-1962

Photo CreditPhoto: Paul Macapia

White energy against a nocturnal background beautifully illustrates the saying: Let there be light.

Swiss painter Paul Klee, 1905

Exhibition HistoryPortland, Oregon, Portland Museum of Art, Paintings by Mark Tobey, July 7-Aug.12, 1945 (San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sept. 8-30, 1945; Chicago, Arts Club of Chicago, Feb.7-27, 1946; Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Alger House, Mar. 1946). Introduction by Julia and Lyonel Feininger. Cat. no. 10. San Francisco, California, Palace of the Legion of Honor, Mark Tobey Retrospective, Mar. 6-31, 1951. No cat. no., reproduced on cover. [Catalogue issued as California Palace of the Legion of Honor Bulletin 8, nos. 11-12 (March-April, 1951)]. Seattle, Washington, Henry Gallery, University of Washington, Mark Tobey Retrospective, May 20-June 27, 1951. Checklist no. 39. [a version of the San Francisco exhibition, it also traveled to Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Aug. 16-Sept. 9, 1951]. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Mark Tobey Retrospective Exhibition, Oct. 4-Nov. 4, 1951. Cat. no. 27. Houston, Texas, Contemporary Arts Museum, Contemporary Calligraphers: John Marin, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Apr.12-May 13, 1956. No cat. no. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, U.S.I.A. European and Pacific Exhibits: Eight American Artists, Jan. 10-Feb. 3, 1957 (exhibition traveled in two different versions under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, one to ten cities in Denmark, Germany, and England; the other to fifteen cities in Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, 1957-1958). No catalogue. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Mark Tobey: A Retrospective Exhibition from Northwest Collections, Sept. 11-Nov. 1, 1959 (Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, Dec. 1959-Jan. 1960; Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Jan.-Feb. 1960; Pasadena, California, Pasadena Art Center, Feb.-Mar. 1960; San Francisco, California, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Mar.-Apr., 1960). Cat. no. 85. Seattle, Washington, Seattle World’s Fair, Fine Arts Pavilion, Seattle Art Museum Mark Tobey Exhibition, 1962. No catalogue. Olympia, Washington, State Capitol Museum, Governor’s Festival of the Arts, Mark Tobey, Feb.17-Mar. 20, [1965 or 1966]. Checklist no.19. Spokane, Washington, Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum, Mark Tobey Retrospective, Mar. 8-Apr. 7, 1968. Seattle, Washington, The Bon Marché, Mark Tobey Paintings from Northwest Collections, Apr 23-May 3, 1969. No catalogue. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Tobey’s 80: A Retrospective, Dec. 3, 1970-Jan. 31, 1971. Cat. no. 44, reproduced. Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Tribute to Mark Tobey, June 7-Sept. 8, 1974 (Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Sept. 27-Nov., 1974; St. Louis, Missouri, City Art Museum, Dec. 7, 1974-Jan. 12, 1975). Cat. no. 4, reproduced. Pullman, Washington, Washington State University Fine Arts Gallery, Northwest Painters Invitational, Apr. 14-May 4, 1975. Miami, Florida, Miami-Dade Community College, The Art Gallery, Mark Tobey, 1930-1967: A Selection of Works from the Seattle Art Museum. Dec. 1, 1975-Jan. 29, 1976. Cat. no. 11, pp. 7, 10, reproduced p. 22. Cincinatti, Ohio, Cincinatti Art Museum, Ten Modern Masters: the Spiritual Search in Art, Apr 30-June 13, 1976. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Northwest Traditions, June 29-Dec. 10, 1978. Text by Martha Kingsbury. No cat. no., reproduced p. 20. Boston, Massachusetts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Northwest Visionaries, July 7-Sept. 6, 1981. No. cat. no, reproduced. Osaka, Japan, National Museum of Art, Pacific Northwest Artists and Japan, Oct. 2-Nov. 28, 1982 (Seattle, Seattle Art Museum, The Pavilion, Jan. 27-Feb. 27, 1983). Cat. no. 116, reproduced. Bellevue, Washington, Bellevue Art Museum, Regional Art: 1940-1962, Apr. 9-May 8, 1983. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Mark Tobey: City Paintings, Mar. 18-June 17, 1984. Cat. no. 12, pp. 48-49, 78, reproduced p. 49. Taiwan, Republic of China, Taiwan Museum of Art, June 25-Sept. 1988 [exhibition organized by the California/International Arts Foundation]. Tacoma, Washington, Tacoma Art Museum, 100 Years of Washington Art: New Perspectives, Nov. 24, 1989-Feb. 11, 1990. No cat. no., listed p. 12. Stanford, California, Stanford University Museum of Art, Mark Tobey: Works on Paper from Northern California and Seattle Collections, Nov. 6-Dec. 23, 1990. Text by Paul Cummings and Judith S. Kays. Cat. no. 11, pp. 12, 17, reproduced p. 12. Los Angeles, California, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rolywholyover—A Circus for Museum by John Cage, Sept. 12-Nov. 28, 1993 (Houston, Texas, The Menil Collection, Jan. 14-Apr. 3, 1994; New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Apr. 29-Aug.13, 1994; Mito, Japan, Art Tower Mito Contemporary Art Center, Nov. 3, 1994-Feb. 26, 1995; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Apr. 2-June 11, 1995). No cat. no., reproduced. Seattle, Washington, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, What it Meant to be Modern: Seattle at Mid-Century, Oct. 15, 1999 - Jan. 23, 2000. Text by Sheryl Conkelton, Martha Kingsbury, and Laura Landau. No cat. no., reproduced. Bellevue, Washington, Bellevue Art Museum, Luminous, Jan. 13 - June 17, 2001. No cat. no., reproduced pp. 61 (detail) and 62. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, International Abstraction: Making Painting Real, May 2, 2003 - Feb. 29. 2004. No catalogue. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Asian Art Museum, Night Sounds: Nocturnal Visions of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, May 4 - Oct. 15, 2006. No catalogue. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical, June 19 - Sept. 7, 2014. Text by Patricia Junker. No cat. no., p. 12, reproduced p. 13, pl. 3.Published ReferencesChevalier, Denys. “Une journée avec Mark Tobey.” Aujourd’hui: Art et architecture 33 (October 1961): p. 4, reproduced. Seattle Art Museum, “Annual Report of the Seattle Art Museum: Fifty-seventh Year, 1962,” 1962; pp. 42, 54, reproduced fig. 29. “Honest Prophet.” Time 74, no. 24 (December 14, 1959): pp. 80-81, reproduced p. 81. Kingsbury, Martha and Sarah Clark. Northwest Traditions. Exh. cat. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1978; p. 20, reproduced. Taylor, Joshua C. The Fine Arts in America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979; p. 203, reproduced. Badiee, Julie. "Mark Tobey's City Paintings: Meditations on an Age of Transition." Journal of Baha'i Studies 1, no. 4 (1989), n.p., reproduced fig. 12. Selz, Peter. Beyond the Mainstream: Essays in Modern and Contemporary Art. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997; p. 152, reproduced fig. 39. Rosenblum, Robert. “American Painting Since the Second World War.” In On Modern American Art: Selected Essays by Robert Rosenblum, pp. 62-63, reproduced fig. 32. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999. [originally published as “La peinture américaine depuis le seconde guerre mondiale,” in Aujourd’hui: Art et architecture 3, no. 18 (July 1958): pp. 12-18]. Conkleton, Sheryl et al. What it Meant to Be Modern: Seattle Art at Mid-Century. Exh. cat. Seattle: Henry Gallery, 2000; reproduced p. 4. Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: NeWest Press, 2002; reproduced pl.5. Wehr, Wesley. “Mark Tobey: A Dialogue Between Painting and Music.” In Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, edited by Wulf Herzogenrath and Andreas Kreul, p. 26, reproduced fig.1. Exh. cat. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press in association with the Museum of Glass, International Center for Contemporary Art, Tacoma, 2002. Johns, Barbara. Paul Horiuchi East and West. Exh. cat. Seattle: University of Washington Press, in association with the Museum of Northwest Art, 2008; p.36, reproduced fig. 39. Balken, Debra Bricker. Mark Tobey: Threading Light. New York: Skira Rizzoli in association with the Addison Gallery of American Art, 2017; p. 21, reproduced pl. 3. Morgan, Robert. Mark Tobey. Exh. Cat. New York: Pace Gallery, 2018; p. 15, fig 11 [not in exhibition].

Credit LineGift of Mrs. Berthe Poncy Jacobson

Dimensions22 1/4 x 14 in. (56.5 x 35.6 cm)

MediumTempera on paperboard mounted on composition board