tooker

^ landscape with figures, 1965-66

^ government bureau

‘magic’ realist george tooker (still kickin’; he just turned 89 last month) studied at the art students league in new york (under the great reginald marsh and paul cadmus, among others) in the ’40s. tooker was inspired by medieval /early renaissance frescoes, and he painted using egg tempera, spending laborious months executing each carefully-planned piece.

^ subway

^ waiting room

^ teller

his more famous works deal with post-war alienation. paintings like government bureau, the waiting room, and subway are modern parables, showing people in the throes of social claustrophobia, isolation, paranoia. naturally i really dug all that when i was sixteen, but now it finally occurred to me to look further into his work, where his themes seem to broaden from social misery/government to more general relationships.

from the book by robert cozzolino:

“By focusing on individuals and the lives they lead in society, whether evident in their choices of intimacy or their dehumanizing political systems, Tooker has given the world multiple stories about what it is to live in the second half of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first. (8)”