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Tomlinson's efforts to combine engagement with distance - the sort of
interactions Adrian Stokes describes in his psychoanalytic criticism.
Photography, though, provides a link between Tomlinson and the
American painter for whom he felt special sympathy, Georgia O'Keeffe,
who all along pursued her art of detached observation. If Tomlinson's
decalcomania
preserve, like a photographic emulsion, the traces and
impressions of events, O'Keeffe's paintings testify to the importance of
photography for American art, to which it offered both an immediate
means of responding to a new environment and a new technology
untainted by the atelier tradition. O'Keeffe and Tomlinson are both
Northerners, fascinated by optical precision, yet drawn to the South,
where subjectivity finds its ideal in the external forms of nature. In
contrast to Pollock, O'Keeffe can evoke the expanse of the American
landscape and the details of its natural forms without abandoning her
meticulous technique and its photographic economy of means.
O'Keeffe might be considered the most traditional of American
painters, not for her allegiance to any orthodoxy, but for her
autochthony. Unlike Hartley, she prided herself on never having studied
in Europe and even confessed to boredom when "the men" discussed
Cezanne. Linked to the land itself, O'Keeffe embodies one version of an
indigenous artistic identity. Her relationship to the New Mexico
landscape recalls that taciturn acceptance of the natural order which
fascinates Tomlinson in
The Hand at Callow Hill Farm
and
Oxen: Plowing
at Fiesole.
But Tomlinson can also appreciate the theatrical flair of her
self-created role, and the fascination of his account of their 1963 meeting
arises in part from the complexity he brings to bear on her external
directness and simplicity.
O'Keeffe's paintings often resolve themselves in overall patterns, as
do Matisse's, but while Matisse's decorative compositions arise from the
sensuous union that inspired Williams, hers retain a hardness, an insistence
on the literal motif. "O'Keeffe's is a separating vision," Tomlinson
observes, "giving her space to contemplate the thing in front of her."
Such distanced art must maintain a sense of straightforward mystery, as
Tomlinson does in his best graphics, and resist the temptation to define
its elusive contents by stepping outside the process of contemplation.
O'Keeffe, like Tomlinson, sometimes strays into the merely symbolic or
the mundane, but in her best works she achieves a suggestive, surreal
quality that seems to have arisen as a natural by-product of her
concentration on her subject - something like that quality of otherness
that first attracted Tomlinson to America.
Tomlinson remarks that O'Keeffe's flower paintings, in which other
critics have read sexual symbols, remain "oddly literal in their strangeness
and isolation" - a description that might apply to much American art.
