TOBEY, Mark

Before becoming a profoundly original American painter, Tobey joined the Bahai religious movement and then studied calligraphy both in Seattle and in Shanghai. He was well into his forties before discovering his innovative calligraphic white writing, in which an unmodulated collection of lines, roughly equal in width, run to the edges of the canvas, at times creating a shimmering surface. As in the careers of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian before him, the turn to before him, the turn to ...