Created at a time when Mark Tobey began garnering widespread critical acclaim and achieving significant international recognition, Desert Town (Wild City), 1950, is a stellar example of the artist’s series of City paintings. Intricate and obsessive in their detail, Tobey’s web-like forms exist within the vast expanse of a soft, rose-hued field of color simultaneously evoking the serenity of a desert landscape and the frantic movement found in everyday urban life. As William Seitz has noted, “…if one is willing to look long enough, the eye and mind are led to enter a unique world of form, space, and meaning” (William Seitz, “Tobey’s World View”, in Mark Tobey, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962, p. 9).

The abstract, calligraphic symbols laid atop Desert Town (Wild City) are redolent of Tobey’s fascination for – and sustained interaction with – various cultures, consolidated through voracious reading, chance encounters and a peripatetic lifestyle. Spanning the iconographic heritage of Western painting and the contemporary legacies of Asian art, as well as the supreme spirituality of the Bahá'í religion, which Tobey adhered to in 1918, the work’s multifarious, cosmopolitan associations profess an unapologetic sense of dynamism that has since come to define the artist’s unique pictorial language.

Desert Town (Wild City)’s storied provenance and exceptional exhibition history attest to its unique position within the artist’s oeuvre. Having resided in the collections of the acclaimed French art critic, curator and collector Michel Tapié, the legendary Galerie Beyeler in Basel, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson – whose collection spanned the most significant movements of postwar American art – the work was created a time of consolidated success for Tobey. A year following its execution, the artist gained his first major retrospective at Legion of Honor in San Francisco, immediately followed by another important retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Subsequent shows and prizes cemented Tobey's place in the art historical canon, bringing further attention to the hand of a true master.