Born on July 19, 1911, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tom A. Robertson followed an artistic path that was anything but predictable. He began adulthood preparing for a career in law, became an accomplished portrait painter, experimented with modernist ideas in New Orleans, and eventually produced a remarkable group of abstract watercolors and screenprints during the 1940s. Although his name is far less familiar today than those of many American modernists, Robertson created work that connected Southern regional culture with some of the most adventurous developments in American abstraction.
Known formally as Thomas Arthur Robertson, he worked in oils, watercolor, gouache, and serigraphy, gradually moving away from recognizable subjects toward compositions built from color, line, rhythm, and unusual organic forms. Several of his works eventually entered major museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where his watercolor Anthurium and the serigraphs The Orange Point and Flight are preserved.
🎨 From Law School to the Art Studio
Robertson grew up in Little Rock in a family where a legal career might have seemed like the natural choice. His father, Thomas N. Robertson, was an attorney and secretary of the Arkansas Law School, and after finishing high school, Robertson enrolled there to study subjects including contract and real estate law. It soon became apparent, however, that his future lay somewhere else. With his father’s support, he left legal studies and decided to pursue art instead.
The decision came with plenty of uncertainty. Robertson reportedly worried that he had started too late and was not even sure that he could draw well enough to become a serious artist. In 1931, he enrolled in a summer art class taught by Little Rock artist May Danaher, then continued his training at the Adrian Brewer School of Art. Within only a few years, his doubts were beginning to look unnecessary. In 1933, he received the George B. Rose scholarship and won the grand prize at the first Spring Amateur Art Exhibit in Arkansas for his oil painting Girl in Green.
Robertson was also helping to build an artistic community around him. In 1933, he participated in the founding of the Little Rock Art League and became its first president. The organization was modeled in part on New York’s Art Students League and offered instruction and exhibitions at a time when opportunities for serious art education in the region were comparatively limited. Among the artists and writers associated with the organization were Charlie May Simon, John Gould Fletcher, Fern Edie Knecht, and printmaker Howard Simon, with whom Robertson began studying printmaking.
🌙 Discovering Modernism in New Orleans
Robertson’s artistic world expanded considerably during the middle of the 1930s. His painting Summer Interlude was included in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ annual exhibition in 1935, giving his work exposure well beyond Arkansas. Later that year, he moved to New Orleans and studied with the modernist painter Paul Ninas.
New Orleans offered an environment quite different from Little Rock. Robertson established a studio on Toulouse Street, became active in the New Orleans Art League, and initially built a reputation largely as a portrait painter. His paintings during this period still dealt with recognizable people, interiors, and scenes, but exposure to modernist ideas was steadily changing the way he thought about composition and color.
Robertson exhibited repeatedly through the New Orleans Art League and at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Fine Arts, today the New Orleans Museum of Art. A 1937 exhibition presented thirteen of his portraits and still lifes, and two works were later shown at the National Exhibition of American Art in New York City. These appearances demonstrated that Robertson had quickly moved beyond his tentative beginnings as an art student only a few years earlier.
🖌️ Returning to Little Rock
Robertson married Virginia Kumbler in New Orleans in April 1937, and the couple soon returned to Little Rock. By 1940, he had become an art instructor at Little Rock Junior College, the institution that would eventually become the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. At the same time, his own art was beginning to change dramatically.
The portrait painter of the 1930s increasingly gave way to an artist fascinated by abstraction. Instead of concentrating on faces and recognizable objects, Robertson began arranging arcs, circles, slashing lines, floating forms, and patches of color across the picture surface. His watercolors became increasingly non-objective, and his screenprints allowed him to explore similar ideas through overlapping layers of carefully controlled color.
It was during this period that Robertson produced the work for which he is perhaps most distinctive today.
🟠 The Orange Point and Robertson’s Screenprints
Screenprinting, often called serigraphy in the fine-art world, was still developing into an important American artistic medium during Robertson’s career. The process allowed artists to push ink through prepared screens one layer at a time, making it possible to create remarkably vivid areas of flat color and complex overlapping forms.
Robertson had encountered printmaking earlier in his career and studied serigraphy while in New Orleans, but after returning to Arkansas he began concentrating much more seriously on the medium. By 1941, several of his serigraphs were being exhibited in New Orleans, including Sweet Boy, The Orange Point, The New Apprentice, and Little Willie.
The Orange Point, dated 1941 by the Cleveland Museum of Art, is an especially revealing example. Curving lines, irregular shapes, floating circles, textured passages, and sudden areas of color create an image that seems simultaneously playful, mysterious, and carefully organized. Nothing in the composition needs to represent a conventional object. Instead, the visual movement itself becomes the subject.
The work demonstrates how far Robertson had traveled from traditional portraiture in less than a decade.
🌀 Abstraction and Caddo Visual Traditions
During the 1940s, Robertson moved increasingly toward complete abstraction. One important source of visual inspiration came from decorative traditions associated with ancient Caddo pottery from the region that is now southwestern Arkansas. Robertson adapted elements such as arcs, circles, serpentine lines, and other graphic forms into his own modern compositions.
The connection is especially interesting because Robertson was not simply importing European modernism into Arkansas. His work developed through an unusual combination of influences: formal artistic training, New Orleans modernism, contemporary abstraction, printmaking experimentation, and visual motifs connected with the region where he had grown up.
That mixture gave his work a distinctive identity. Some of his abstractions can recall maps, biological forms, weather patterns, or imaginary landscapes without becoming literal depictions of any of them. Color and line seem to drift, collide, separate, and reconnect, giving the images an almost musical rhythm.
⚙️ Art During the War Years
Robertson’s career changed again during World War II. In 1942, he began working as a civilian draftsman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Little Rock. The demands of that job limited the amount of time available for large paintings, but he continued making smaller watercolors and tempera works.
His abstract work nevertheless continued to attract attention. In 1945, twenty of his non-objective watercolors were shown at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts, and those works later appeared alongside his serigraphs in a solo exhibition at the Little Rock Public Library. During the Little Rock exhibition, Robertson explained his view that an abstract painting did not need a single prescribed interpretation. What mattered was the relationship among form, line, and color and the response those elements produced in the viewer.
It was a remarkably modern way of thinking about art, particularly for an artist whose career had begun with conventional portraits little more than a decade earlier.
🌍 Paris, California and a Quiet Withdrawal From Art
Around 1946, Robertson’s work for the Army Corps of Engineers took him to Europe when he was transferred to the American Graves Registration Command in Paris. His surviving biography suggests that he largely stopped painting while living in France, bringing the most active period of his artistic career to a surprisingly early close.
Robertson returned to the United States in 1957 and eventually settled in Albion, California. He continued working for the Army Corps of Engineers until approximately 1960 and spent the remainder of his life on the California coast. He died on May 25, 1976.
The relative brevity of Robertson’s mature artistic career helps explain why his name can be easy to overlook. He did not spend the postwar decades continually exhibiting, promoting a recognizable artistic brand, or moving through the increasingly influential New York gallery system. Much of the work for which he is remembered came from an intense period between the late 1930s and mid-1940s.
🖼️ Rediscovering Tom A. Robertson
Robertson’s work nevertheless found its way into important American collections. The Smithsonian American Art Museum preserves works by him under the name Tom A. Robertson, while The Orange Point is also held by the Cleveland Museum of Art. His screenprints and watercolors have continued to attract interest from museums, collectors, and historians of American printmaking.
His career also complicates the familiar geography of American modernism. The story of twentieth-century abstract art is often told through New York, Paris, or the major West Coast art centers, but Robertson’s development reminds us that modernism was taking shape in many less obvious places. Little Rock and New Orleans were part of that story too.
Robertson absorbed new artistic ideas while remaining connected to the visual culture of the American South. He experimented with an emerging printmaking process, moved from portraits to non-objective art, and created compositions that could look surprisingly contemporary many decades later.
☄️ Tom A. Robertson in the Comet Atomic Universe
Tom A. Robertson belongs naturally in the Comet Atomic universe because his career sits at a fascinating crossroads in twentieth-century American culture. His abstract work emerged just before the great explosion of postwar American painting, while his screenprints belong to an era when artists were discovering new ways to combine modern imagery with increasingly accessible reproduction techniques.
There is something especially compelling about artists like Robertson whose names did not become cultural shorthand but whose work reveals just how widespread artistic experimentation had become by the 1940s. Modernism was not confined to a handful of famous studios. It was appearing in regional art leagues, small colleges, museum exhibitions, print workshops, watercolors, and screenprints throughout the country.
Born in Little Rock on July 19, 1911, Tom A. Robertson began as a young man uncertain whether he could even draw. Within little more than a decade, he had become an inventive modernist producing some of the most intriguing abstract screenprints to emerge from the American South.
His story is a reminder that the history of modern art is filled with fascinating figures waiting to be rediscovered.
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