The importance that making music (as well as listening to it and thinking about it) had for Mark Tobey is well known. Reflections have been made on his being a painter and his sitting at the piano, the habit and pleasure of a lifetime. However, the present work intends to explore in due depth the theme of Mark Tobey’s relationship to music for the first time, highlighting both its expression and consequences. In concrete terms, what was making music for him? What traces remained of this assiduous practice? Which (at times absolutely central) figures of the music of his day was he closest to and what exchanges were there between them? What meaning did all this have for him? A research project of this kind,with the new acquisitions that accompany it, is destined to qualify the figure of Tobey the painter and illuminate it. The eye that beholds his production, once aware of the world of sounds that nourished, that shaped these works, will see them in quite a new light.

Visual art is well aware of rhythm: the analogous manner in which lines occupy space, or even create it. In the light of this fundamental bond between the two disciplines, the artist’s approach inevitably stands in relation to the time dimension. Mark Tobey, committed to tracing narratives of which the primary sense is that of being created through time, shows a certain familiarity with time, and the smile of the one who – letting the gaze wander through to the abstract background of things – creates their union through perennial movement.

In a territory never truly explored up until now, this publication provides both the point of arrival of all-encompassing research and the opportunity to embark on a new approach.