Untitled

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.