1929
Alfred Barr Jr. invites him to take part in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans planned for the Winter of 1930/31 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1930
Cornish School, Seattle
1931
Retrospective, Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York
Drawings and Watercolours by Mark Tobey, Harry Hartman Bookstore and Gallery, Seattle
1931-37
Tobey is "resident artist" in Dartington Hall, Devonshire, Great Britain. He gets to know Pearl S. Buck, Aldous Huxley, Bernard Leach, Rabindranath Tagore, Rudi Shankar and many others who are also teaching there and for whom, as for himself, the connection of oriental and western ideas is very important.
1934
Trip to Europe and Asia. He spends a month in a Zen monastery near Kyoto, Japan. He studies Zen teachings, Zen painting, meditates and spends much time studying calligraphy. In Japan Tobey finds - as he later described it himself - the "most decisive calligraphic impulse" which would later lead him to the "white writing". At the same time, however, he is aware that he is and will always be a man of the West.
First museum solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum
Paintings and Drawings by Mark Tobey, Beaux-Arts Gallery, Bruton Place, London, Great Britain; Paul Elder Gallery, San Francisco
1935
He paints the works Broadway and Welcome Hero in Dartington Hall, Devonshire, Great Britain. In these works Tobey uses the "white writing" style for the first time.
Stanley Rose Gallery, Hollywood
1940
Tobey receives his first Award: Baker Memorial Award, Northwest Annual Exhibition, Seattle Art Museum
The Arts Club of Chicago