HEARNE PARDEE
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mechanical reproduction, painting itself seems a vestigial craft of some era
when materials and techniques maintained a closer contact with our
environment. As recent critical theory doubts the capacity of images in
general to inform us of things around us, we tend to forget that our
tumultuous period in art originated with the Impressionists and their
close attention to the phenomenal world.
It
is in this perspective,
though, that it makes sense to ask how the persistent interest in nature
and representation, which even seems to have revived in recent years,
might yet contribute to contemporary art.
American modernists of the early twentieth century believed, at least
in principle, in observation of nature, even if they often imposed on their
subjects a vision derived from modern art in Europe - the cubistic
austerity of Sheeler or Demuth no less than the expressionist
improvisation of Marin and Dove. Their practice relied heavily on the
Romantic faith in contact with nature as a source of liberating
originality, of new languages for new landscapes, and it reached one
culmination in Jackson Pollock's submission to surrealist automatism.
If
there is a place for nature in today's self-conscious art, it would seem to
require a more modest approach to the phenomenal world, tempered by
our sober awareness of the complexity of images and less insistent on
their purity and ultimate truth. British poet Charles Tomlinson, with his
reaction against Romantic self-centeredness and his work in both verbal
and visu al forms, provides one model for such an approach, and an
especially interesting one due to his long engagement with American
modernism.
If
there is irony in proposing Tomlinson as a model for America,
given his indebtedness to Pound, Williams and other American poets,
there is also some justice, since Tomlinson, for all the earnestness of this
attention to nature, is fundamentally an ironist, informed by a central
awareness of the distance between his medium and the reality it proposes
to articulate. He writes admiringly of a poem by Marianne Moore that
it "penetrates ... while refusing to merge." His contemplative
detachment cloaks a complex balance of distance and desire. The appeal
of American art resided for him not only in its new directness but in its
remoteness; he recounts his discovery of "that unknown quantity,
American art," particularly the impression made by Georgia O'Keeffe's
"The Mountain" - his first glimpse of New Mexico - in a postwar
handbook of world art, "two by three inches and in monochrome." On
subsequent travels in America Tomlinson established dialogues with its
landscapes as well as with its poets and artists, yet without abandoning
the special perspective of his European background - penetrating, but
refusing
to
merge.
Like his poems, and his first impression of O'Keeffe, Tomlinson's
