Mirage and Reflection

Date1944

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

Label TextThe philosophical foundation for Mark Tobey’s “white writing” paintings was his Baha’i faith. It emphasizes the common bond between all people—a concept Tobey pictured as a force field that he represented with a white line. In the early 1940s, he moved back and forth between scenes of the city at night, purely non-objective white-line calligraphic paintings, and religious subjects, seeing all of them as interconnected in his thoughts about the forces of enlightenment. Once the calligraphic paintings won Tobey critical acclaim, in 1944, the religious subjects were pushed to the background. As such, paintings such as this one are quite rare. This example, lovely in its drawing and evocation of antiquity, was painted in 1944, the year of Tobey’s all-important “white writing” show at Willard Gallery in New York. Robert Shields may have been known as “one of the Grand Old Men in Northwest architecture” (Pacific Northwest Magazine), but it is his enduring passion for art that leaves a lasting legacy at SAM. When Mr Shields passed away in the summer of 2012, he left his entire estate to the Seattle Art Museum, its value to be used in support of the Asian art program. One of the foremost Northwest architects of the mid-20th century, Mr Shields graduated from the University of Washington with an architecture degree in 1941. After serving in the Navy in WWII, he returned to Seattle and founded the architecture firm Tucker, Shields and Terry in 1946. Over the course of the next 30 years he established a reputation as one of the foremost Northwest architects as he designed homes, commercial spaces, the KIRO-TV headquarters, and Canlis restaurant. A champion of Northwest art and artists (he counted Zoe Dusanne, Don Foster, Morris Graves, and Kenneth Callahan among his friends), Mr Shields was also passionate about Asian and Native American art, as well as European decorative arts; and he collected in all of these areas. He was a member of the museum’s Asian Art Council, the Seattle Clay Club, and the Puget Sound Bonsai Society. In honor of the opening of SAM Downtown in 1991, he donated several Japanese objects and a Morris Graves painting to the collection.

Object number2013.4.2

Photo CreditPhoto: Elizabeth Mann

Exhibition History{exhibited at SAM as Bahai--exhibition to be identified}

Credit LineGift of the Estate of Robert M. Shields

Dimensions7 1/2 x 19 1/2 in. (19.1 49.5 cm)

MediumTempera on paperboard