The American abstract painter Mark Tobey’s greatest aspiration was to convey universal themes in his works. This distances him from his contemporaries, such as Pollock and Rothko, who were perhaps more concerned with capturing their own existential anguish. This 1954 gouache is a good example of Tobey’s delicate, linear style derived both from observation and from Surrealist automatism and Oriental mysticism, which influenced him following his trip to China and Japan in 1934. As in most of Tobey’s paintings, here he builds an all-over pictorial structure from earthy shades splashed with light touches of varied colors in a series of floating, interlaced calligraphic forms that make up his own particular spatial representation of the cosmos. The tension between surface and depth, between light and shade, between automatism and the elegance of gesture, without any special emphasis on any fragment of the picture surface, can be linked to his devotion to music, which made him sensitive to the importance of rhythm in visual works. Indeed, it is the musical aspect of his painting that led John Cage to remark that Tobey was one of the visual artists who had most greatly influenced him, something he demonstrated by dedicating the composition 25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey to him in 1972
