A member of the New York School, Bradley Walker Tomlin (1899 – 1953) became known for his refined, elegant abstractions of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Known as the “gentleman Abstract Expressionist,” Tomlin developed a distinctive but more restrained language of abstraction in contrast to the more visceral and gestural brushwork of many of his counterparts.

After early experiments with figurative painting, Cubism, and Surrealism, in the late 1940s Tomlin transitioned into an all-over abstract style, featuring sweeping trails of pale, ribbon-like brushstrokes hovering over dark grounds laden with suggestive symbols. In dialogue with the other painters of the New York School, Tomlin’s evocative, calligraphic abstractions were begun within a year of Pollock’s radical new drip paintings and Willem de Kooning’s black and white abstractions.

Tomlin would explore and refine his distinctive style of painterly abstraction until his untimely death in 1953. In the early 1950s, Tomlin abandoned his trails of paint and suggestive symbols to layer purely abstract, geometric forms; in Number 3 a profusion of rectangular and circular forms is scattered across a tan background—creamy white, burnt orange, and turquoise squares hover over a flurry of rounded, softly painted forms in muted, earthy colors. The pulsing shapes create a sense of depth and rhythm, achieving a feeling of optical depth through abstraction, seeming to embrace his friend Hans Hofmann’s revolutionary concept of push and pull with forms that seems to pull away from the surface.

Despite his penchant for subdued palettes, Tomlin achieved remarkable color harmonies in his compositions; as the painter Phillip Guston, who dedicated a painting to Tomlin in 1952, recalled, “Tomlin could take an old yellow and a dirty white and make them sing.”