“[Tomlin] could take an old yellow and a dirty white and make them sing.”
—Philip Guston
Bradley Walker Tomlin occupies a distinctive place in the history of Abstract Expressionism. Admired by his fellow artists, he remains less widely recognized than Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, or studio-mate Robert Motherwell. Despite flying largely under the radar today, Philip Guston and Hans Hofmann dedicated paintings to him, Richard Pousette-Dart dedicated his book to Tomlin, and Calvert Coggeshall named his own son “Tomlin” after his close friend. And Tomlin’s paintings offer something essential to our understanding of the movement: a language of abstraction in which delicacy, restraint, and carefully measured rhythms carry remarkable expressive force.
Small Wind Disturbing a Bonfire, 1949 brings these qualities into focus. Across an elongated, dark ground, pale ribbons of paint curl, sweep, and flicker, suggesting flames stirred by a passing breeze. The title gives us a poetic way into the composition: an invisible force becomes perceptible through the movement it sets in motion. Broad strokes of creamy yellow mingle with fine, looping lines. Some retain the drag and texture of the brush; others appear almost weightless. The intervals between them give each gesture room to resonate, while a long, curving stroke near the lower right steadies the composition. The painting holds movement and stillness in a delicate balance. What continues to strike me about this work is the expressive range Tomlin achieves with so few elements. Its pale strokes seem momentary, yet their effect endures.
Tomlin arrived at this abstract language after an established career in illustration and representational painting at Rehn Gallery, who represented the likes of Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield. By the late 1940s, his experiments with Cubism and Surrealism had developed into increasingly free, calligraphic compositions. His mature work shares the ambition of the emerging New York School while expressing a sensibility distinctly his own.
The provenance of Small Wind Disturbing a Bonfire places it within the community that shaped postwar American abstraction. It belonged to sculptor Herbert Ferber, Tomlin’s friend and a fellow participant in the developing New York School. Ferber described a “heroic but gentle Mozartian kind of quality” in Tomlin’s work, which beautifully captures this painting’s combination of assurance and sensitivity.
That sensitivity also reached beyond the art world. Encountering Small Wind Disturbing a Bonfire at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, renowned writer Paul Auster (1947-2024) found in it the starting point for his poem Search for a Definition (On Seeing a Painting by Bradley Walker Tomlin).
Search for a Definition (On Seeing a Painting by Bradley Walker Tomlin)
By Paul Auster
Always the smallest act
possible
in this time of acts
larger than life, a gesture
toward the thing that passes
almost unseen. A small wind
disturbing a bonfire, for example,
which I found the other day
by accident
on a museum wall. Almost nothing
is there: a few wisps
of white
thrown idly against the pure black
background, no more
than a small gesture
trying to be nothing
more than itself. And yet
it is not here
and to my eyes will never become
a question
of trying to simplify
the world, but a way of looking for a place
to enter the world, a way of being
present
among the things
that do not want us—but which we need
to the same measure that we need
ourselves. Only a moment before
the beautiful
woman
who stood before me
had been saying how much she wanted
a child
and how time was beginning
to run out on her. We said
we must each write a poem
using the words 'a small
wind
disturbing a bonfire.' Since that time
nothing
has meant more than the small
act
present in these words, the act
of trying to speak
words
that mean almost nothing. To the very end
I want to be equal
to whatever it is
my eye will bring me, as if
I might finally see myself
let go
in the nearly invisible
things
that carry us along with ourselves and all
the unborn children
into the world.
Auster’s poem considers how a small artistic gesture can deepen our presence in the world. A few marks on a canvas become a way of attending to things that might otherwise pass almost unseen. His response gives words to the painting’s quiet power: the way a slight disturbance can transform what we see and how we feel.
