George Tooker 1920 —

"I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy."

—George Tooker

"For decades now, Tooker has been trying to tell us something about what's wrong— and what's right—about the modern world, and in particular Modern America. His work is consistently cutting edge in both conception and execution;and it always tell us something we need to know or remember."

—Progressive Living

GEORGE TOOKER B. 1920

George Tooker's ideas are developed slowly and the execution of his paintings in the egg tempera technique is painstaking.   From conception to completion, Tooker's paintings can take six months or more to complete, as layer after layer of color must be laid down on panels in order to achieve the luminosity characteristic of his work. Subtle textures are added with hatched brushstrokes and highlights and shadows are refined as the forms take on bulk and dimension and the image grows in density, richness, and depth. Many of his ideas require multiple explorations of a subject within the boundaries of a particular theme in order to reach their fullest expression, and Tooker's body of work since 1945 consists of fewer than one hundred and fifty small egg tempera panels.  Fascinated by geometric design and symmetry, he works slowly, completely about two paintings a year because he spends much time searching for the underlying idea.

Some critics have described his style as "magic realism," but he was not interested in the illusionary effects that many of the painters of that style espouse. He has regarded himself as more of a reporter or observer of society than an interpreter. 

Tooker began his career at a time when the prevailing aesthetic was "modernism" and the darlings of the art world included such artistic frauds as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.  Tooker, however, was clear from the beginning that he had no interest in minimalist art, of the sort that abstraction dictates.   Very much to the contrary, he was instead bent on creating "maximalist" art.  He has said that "in one kind of painting I'm trying to say 'this is what we are forced to suffer in life,' while in other paintings I say 'this is what we should be.'"  Tooker is today’s longest reigning social realist.

Lincoln Kirstein, an advocate of Tooker's art from early on, has written with rare insight that Tooker's approach "assumes the durable products of this art are expressions of ideas rather than a craft or the demonstrations of self-love or self-pity.  It accepts painting as a triumph of the orderly, the intelligent, and the achieved, rather than as a victim of the decorative, the fragmentary, or the improvised.  It assumes the human mind is obligated toward synthesis, and that, at its most interesting, establishes order rather than disorder, from infinities of observable phenomena. . . .These pictures are essential rather than anecdotal.  They attempt to define qualities and conditions independently of their designers' appetites. . . . Their reference moves outward toward a universal legibility rather than inward toward a limited correspondence."

Biography

George Claire Tooker, Jr. was born August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn New York.  He was the first child of a Cuban-American mother and a father who was a municipal bond broker.   

Shortly after his birth the Tooker family moved to the more rural Bellport in south-central Long Island, some fifty miles east of New York City.  Here Tooker's father worked for a group of banks and achieved modest prosperity.

The trajectory of his life began to manifest itself from the age of seven, when he began taking painting lessons from Malcolm Fraser, a family friend whose oeuvre was in the Barbizon tradition.

Tooker began high school in Bellport; however, his parents weren't much impressed with the quality of the school, and he spent his last two years at the more rigorously academi Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, north of Boston.  He gravited instead toward the school's art studio, where he worked at landscape drawing and watercolors. 

By virtue of its location, Andover did furnish some additional, if unintended education:  Tooker became aware of effects of the Depresssion on the mill towns north of Andover.   After graduation from Phillips in 1938, Tooker went on to Harvard, where he majored in English literature.  Yet he spent much of his time at the Fogg Art Museum, and in the towns surrounding Boston, where he made watercolor sketches of the urban and rural landscapes.  The Fogg's holdings include early Italian Renaissance, pre-Raphaelite and 19th-century French art.  He also took up with some radical political organizations, but soon found them doctrinaire and boring.   Nevertheless, it was during this time that he first became interested in the potential of art as a tool for social justice.  Especially inspirational was the work of Mexican painters, especially David Alfaro Siquieros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

Securing his parent's support, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York.  Here he studied with Reginald Marsh (see:  "Tatoo and Haircut") who worked in egg tempera, Kenneth Hayes Miller (see:  "Shopper by an Awning") who also taught Edward Hopper, and Harry Sternberg  From the standpoint of influence, it cannot be entirely coincidental that all three of these artists were social realists who expressed their concerns in their work.

In 1944 Tooker met the painter Paul Cadmus.  Cadmus was another painter who worked with egg tempera (using traditional Reanissance techniques), and transmitted this expertise to Tooker, whose use of this medium marks his mature style.  Cadmus encouraged Tooker to work with tempera rather than the transparent wash technique taught by Marsh.   Tooker subsequently adopted a method of using egg yolk thickened slightly with water and then adding powdered pigment, a medium that was quick drying, tedious to apply, and hard to change once applied. 

In 1949 Cadmus and Tooker spent six months travelling in Italy and France; and in the same year George met painter William Christopher, who was to become his life partner until Christopher's death in 1973.

In 1950 Tooker and Christopher moved to W. 18th St.  Here, in order to support themselves, they made custom furniture.   However, Tooker was beginning to earn both recognition and income from his art:  the Whitney Museum bought his best-known painting, The Subway, that year; he had a one-man exhibition in New York City in '51 at the Hewitt Gallery.  In '54 he received a commission to design sets for an opera; and in '55 there was another one-man show.  With greater means as their disposal, the two first bought and renovated a brownstone on State Street in Brooklyn Heights (1953); in the late 50s, he and Christopher built a weekend home near Hartland, Vermont; from 1965 to 1968, he taught at the Art Students League but has lived the later part of his life between Hartland, Vermont and Malaga, Spain.

The one-man shows in New York galleries picked up speed, taking place in 1960, '62, '64, and '67.  Then it was time to give something back:  he return to the Art Students League to teach himself from 1965 to 1968.  However, at the end of this period, Christopher's health was beginning to deteriorate to such an extent that Vermont winters were too severe for him.  They began a search for a home in Europe where they could winter over, and ultimately found an apartment in Malaga, Spain.   Christopher died in Spain in 1973.  The same year, a major survey exhibition of Tooker's work was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. That exhibition traveled to Chicago, New York, and Indianapolis.

Works by George Tooker are in many major museums including: Addison Gallery of American Art; Boca Raton Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Academy of Design; National Gallery of Art; Oklahoma City Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Sara Roby Foundation; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Columbus Museum of Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art .

An important source for modern and contemporary American & European Art in East Hampton, New York & worldwide, Vered Gallery's spectacular wide-ranging inventory consists of unique paintings, drawings, large & small scale sculpture, monotypes, prints and photographs  by Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Cartier-Bresson, Marc Chagall, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Winslow Homer, Wolf Kahn, Jeff Koons, Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Thomas Moran, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Bert Stern, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Carleton E Watkins, Tom Wesselmann and Andrew Wyeth.

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