Mark Tobey / Morris Graves

This exhibition highlights an important group of approximately 14 interconnected works that are some of the most significant paintings by Tobey and Graves in the museum’s permanent collection. Night Sounds: Nocturnal Visions of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves explores work from what proved to be a period of intense creativity for both artists during the early 1940s. Using a limited palette of darks and whites, Tobey and Graves created paintings that reflected their outlook on the world. In Tobey’s work blackness gave form and meaning to light itself. His subsequent “white writing” was a visualization of energies of the modern city at night, of human activity, and of an individual’s intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. For Graves, light and darkness represented his emotional states, and in these paintings he explored something of the essential mysteries of the night—light in the dark can expose both the truth of life’s cruelty as well as the beautiful and ephemeral quality of living things.

Curated by Patricia Junker, Curator of American Art.

Pressetext

Night Sounds:
Nocturnal Visions of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves
Part of the Northwest Summer Celebration
SAAM North Galleries
Kurator: Patricia Junker