Mark Tobey: From the Market to the Mystical

Pike Street Market Reportage depicts the Spirit of Place

Untitled (from Market Series), 1944, tempera on paperboard, 17” x 13” © Mark Tobey

Figurative art is defined as any work that depicts real-life imagery clearly, most often recognizable depictions of the human form. Mark Tobey (1890–1976) was an artist who’s work ‘dabbled’ in figuration and ultimately in abstraction. This conversion in style and sensibility began with his reportorial depictions of the Pike Street Market in Seattle, Washington.

Men of the Market, 1939, (detail), each is tempera on paper, 19” x 15” © Mark Tobey

Between 1941 and 1945, he completed a distinctive series of works in tempera paint that were based on his in situ Market sketches of the workers and drifters within the abstract-like maze of daily market activity. 

‘The Market will always be within me…It has been for me a refuge, an oasis, a most human growth, the heart and soul of Seattle.’ - Mark Tobey

Tobey arrived in Seattle in 1921, from New York City in the early 1920s, following a marriage and quick divorce, and some success as a magazine illustrator. He connected with the Pike Street Market, and loved drawing there. At that time the Market was perched above a long row of working piers topped by warehouses with streets lined with taverns, pawn shops, girlie show theaters, third-run movie houses, flop houses and missions. The grittiness appealed to him.