Bradley Walker Tomlin
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BRADLEY WALKER TOMLIN came of English and Huguenot stock. He was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1899. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1921 and won a Hiram Gee fellowship for study abroad. This and a Tiffany Foundation fellowship in 1922 enabled him to spend several years in Europe. He studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and La Grande Chaumière, and traveled and worked In France, Italy and England until 1927 when he returned to New York. From 1932 to 1941 he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville.
His early work, landscape, figure and still life painting which reflected his studies of the art of the past, of Cézanne and the School of Paris, was exhibited in oneman shows in New York at the Anderson Galleries in 1923, the Montross Gallery, 1924 and 1927, and the Rehn Gallery in 1931. Through the 1930's and in the early 1940's Tomlin worked within the cubist tradition, developing an elegant and soberly decorative style, devoted chiefly to still life, which he exhibited in 1944 at the Rehn Gallery. In this period he painted a mural at Memorial Hospital, Syracuse; in 1946 he won an award at Carnegie Institute's International Exhibition and in 1949 a purchase prize from the University of Illinois.
In the mid- 1940's his art began a change of direction. The coolly ordered, rectangular spaces of his canvases broke into freer patterning and a bold encompassing calligraphic line enriched his design. He was soon to experiment with pure calligraphy against a monochrome ground; then, with seeming swiftness, his fully realized, final idiom emerged in a remarkable series of paintings, and Tomlin at once took his place among the leading figures of mid-century American art. He showed these paintings in 1950 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, at the Museum of Modern Art in Fifteen Americans in 1952, and again at the Parsons Gallery in 1953.
These late paintings have strong linear relationships and juxtapositions of calligraphic elements over a background space in which the only hint of recession in depth is in the use of color. The calligraphy has the suppleness and strength of the Chinese, but the blocky, ribbonlike shapes bear no more than accidental similarity to the Chinese ideogram. The colors are few, the forms restricted, but the mastery of sequence and contrast gives the work a controlled spontaneity, reserved richness and a subtle strength.
Tomlin's death of a heart ailment in 1953 cut short his work at the height of its power. He is represented in a dozen or more major museum and university collections in the United States.
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