Summer Joy - SOLD

Summer Joy  is an original artwork realized by  Mark Tobey  in 1972.

Aquatint on paper.

Signed in pencil on the lower right margin. Numbered in pencil on the lower left margin. Edition of 96 prints.

Good conditions except for yellowing of paper and some stains.

The artwork is a beautiful example of abstract compositions realized by the artist in the 1970s, when Tobey was living in Switzerland.

Mark Tobey  (United States, 1890 – Basel, 1976) was an important and popular American artist. He was born in Wisconsin (USA) and he was predominantly self-taught; in 1909, he moved to Chicago, where he was employed as a fashion illustrator, a profession that he continued when he moved to New York two years later. When he moved to New York, he worked as an artist for McCall’s Magazine and had some success as a portrait painter. In 1918, he was introduced to the Bahai World Faith, a lifestyle and a religion that promotes universal consciousness. Tobey created complex compositions with no focal points. During the 1930s, he taught art in Devon, England; during the same years, he started studying Oriental philosophy and art in China, and living in a Zen monastery in Japan. In 1958, he became the second American, after Whistler, to win the International Grand Prize at the Venice Biennal. In 1960, he moved to Switzerland with his wife for the rest of his life. He died in Basel in 1976. His calligraphic style was a visual manifestation of the interrelationship between the artist and nature. The artist is well-known for his calligraphic “white writing” style, and became one of the most renowned and internationally respected American artists during the 1950s and 1960s. The white writing compositions are a result of his experiments with Chinese calligraphy with vibrating movement and light.
Mark Tobey is considered one of the most important American painters of the XX century. In both his life and artworks, he expressed an interest in mystical states of mind. Indeed, he is considered a "mystical painter". The artist is one of the pioneers and a founding father of artistic ferment that culminated, in the second part of the century, in Abstract Expressionism.