Mark Tobey film screening at Seattle Art Museum

Seattle Art Museum will screen three rare Mark Tobey documentaries on Saturday, April 25, in a two-hour program tied to its current Northwest modernism exhibition. (seattleartmuseum.org) The screening runs from 2 to 4 p.m. in Plestcheeff Auditorium at the downtown museum, and the museum’s ticketing page lists the event as RSVP-based. (seattleartmuseum.org) Seattle Met reported that the program was curated by Scarecrow Video and brings together three short films shot in the 1960s and 1970s about Tobey, a central figure in Northwest art. (seattlemet.com) The museum says the films show Tobey in Seattle, including Pike Place Market, and abroad, tracing how he looked at cities, people, and movement. One of the documentaries begins with his work installed in a gallery and then moves through market stalls, signs, wires, and crowds. (seattleartmuseum.org) The program lands while Seattle Art Museum is presenting “Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,” a show of more than 150 works that reexamines 20th-century art from the region. The exhibition identifies Tobey as one of the local artists who helped define the Northwest School. (seattleartmuseum.org) That timing matters inside the museum because the films turn a gallery story into a moving-image one: paintings on the wall, then the artist walking through the city that shaped them. Cascade PBS described the screening as part of the museum’s broader “Beyond Mysticism” presentation. (cascadepbs.org) Tobey was born in Wisconsin in 1890, worked in Seattle for key stretches of his career, and died in Basel, Switzerland, in 1976. The Smithsonian American Art Museum says his art centered on universal themes of people, nature, and God. (americanart.si.edu) He is best known for dense, calligraphic compositions that later writers often describe as “white writing,” a style shaped in part by his study of Asian calligraphy and Arabic script. Seattle Art Museum’s collection also includes his “Market Scenes,” sketches of Seattle Public Market made between 1939 and 1941. (woodsidebrasethgallery.com; seattleartmuseum.org) For Seattle viewers, the April 25 screening offers the rare chance to watch Tobey’s work and the city around him in the same frame, inside the museum now showing his place in the region’s art history. (seattleartmuseum.org); (seattleartmuseum.org)