560
PARTISAN REVIEW
balance can offer a useful perspective on the emotional ambivalence
which underlies the urge for purity and objectivity in much American
art.
With its tendency toward extremes, American painting still finds elusive
the fullness and equilibrium achieved by Matisse and Cezanne.
Tomlinson's emotional poise comes not just by temperament but
from a sense of security in his surroundings and in the roles of poet and
artist, roles Americans have had, to a much greater extent, to forge for
themselves. Marsden Hartley, for example, a painter in the Stieglitz circle,
migrated restlessly from New York to Europe. Sensitive to the links
between the European art he admired and its local context, he painted
directly from Cezanne's mountain in Aix. His search for roots inspired his
eventual return to Maine, where he had spent an unhappy childhood,
but even there he remained estranged. Although he painted local motifs,
his art is inwardly motivated; for all the richness of his color, he lacks
Cezanne's sense of
plein-air
luminosity and works primarily from memory.
Similarly, the sexual passions which inspire his obsessive drawings of
muscular sailors seem subconsciously expressed, as though to conceal them
not just from his audience but from himself Where Matisse paints frankly
sexual nudes - which we accept not just for their refinement but because
of the central place of the nude in Western art - the rigidity of Hartley's
figures testify to the isolation and uncertainty of the artist himself,
sensitive to the risks of personal exposure in a society lacking a
commonly accepted artistic license.
Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, externalizes his unconscious
process and resolves all the problems posed by the object in nature with a
single, sustained fusion. In his efforts to unite the vast spaces of the
American West to the mythic realms of the surrealist subconscious,
Pollock employs a technique of automatism similar to
decalcomanIa.
But
where Tomlinson produces his swirls by an impersonal process akin to
photography, Pollock insists on remaining "in" the painting, as though
to control every drop by a sort of shamanism. Pollock eliminates the
boundary between outer and inner worlds on which objectivity is
founded, while Tomlinson employs the window device to restore his
rational distance. Tomlinson understands that his relationship to nature
entails a social commitment to shared discourse, and in that sense he can
speak of an "ethic of perception."
Tomlinson is thus relevant to painting after Pollock, in its search
for a new equilibrium. By temperament, his graphics belong to the
reaction against abstract expressionism, to the cool art of the 1960s and
seventies, with its interests in photography, documentation and
environmental processes. Many painters trained under abstract
expressionism sought to temper its intense subjectivity with a renewed
involvement in observation, and have come thereby to share in
l
