About this artwork
Untitled effectively embodies its maker’s goal of melding Eastern calligraphy and Western drawing. Mark Tobey studied brushwork in China and Japan, where he lived for a while in a Zen monastery. Around 1935 Tobey arrived at his distinctive “white writing,” or intricate networks of calligraphic marks that densely and evenly animate a surface. When viewed from a distance, these dabs and dashes of pigment interspersed with short, overlapping lines—create a writhing, unified field of energy. In Untitled the subdued palette of lavender, white, gray, black, and burgundy functions similarly—the innumerable strokes and marks only become distinct from close-up. A smoothly painted border, which appears in much of Tobey’s oeuvre, surrounds and offsets the vibrating center. The artist felt that his delicate, teeming webs of “living line” mirrored the connections between East and West, finite and infinite, humanity and the cosmos.
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Status
- Currently Off View
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Department
- Contemporary Art
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Artist
- Mark Tobey
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Title
- Untitled
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Place
- United States (Artist's nationality:)
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Date
- 1964
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Medium
- Oil and collage on canvas
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Dimensions
- 212.1 × 157 cm (83 1/2 × 61 13/16 in.)
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Credit Line
- Grant J. Pick Purchase Fund
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Reference Number
- 1965.359
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Copyright
- © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Extended information about this artwork
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.
