One of the most acclaimed painters of his generation, George Tooker (1920-2011), who possessed an originality and depth of vision that is unsurpassed in modern American art, died this past Sunday from kidney failure. For over sixty years, he has been highly regarded for his luminous and often enigmatic work. His themes range from alienation and the dehumanizing aspects of contemporary society to personal meditations on the human condition. ARTKABINETT art collector social network celebrates the talent of this visionary painter.
Tooker (1947 self portrait shown right) began his career at a time when the prevailing aesthetic was "modernism" and the darlings of the art world were American minimalists.
Tooker, however, was clear from the beginning that he had no interest in minimalist art, 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 first came to prominence for imaginative visions that expressed the uncertainty of the Cold War era. Among his best-known paintings is "Subway" (1950, Whitney Museum of American Art), a powerful work that explores the anxiety and isolation of nameless individuals in urban society.
He was very involved with the Civil Rights Movement as well, in one instance marching in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1965, and frequently addressed issues of race and oppression in his work.
In addition to his engagement with social commentary, Tooker also created strikingly beautiful paintings of a more personal nature, many of which are concerned with states of consciousness, mysterious meditative realms between sleep and wakefulness.
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.
A year later, with the financial support of his family, George moved to a flat on the bohemian Bleecker Street in Greewich Village, New York.
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 into an illegal loft located at 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 1951, in 1954 he received a commission to design sets for an opera and in 1955 he held his second one-man show.
With greater means as their disposal, the two first bought and renovated a brownstone on State Street in Brooklyn Heights and then, in the late 1950s, he and Christopher built a weekend home near Hartland, Vermont. The one-man shows in New York galleries picked up speed, Tooker having his own exhibitions in 1960, 1962, 1964 and 1967.
Christopher died in Spain in 1973, and Tooker spent most of 1974 there, wrapping up disposition of his estate. Also in '73, 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. In 1976 Tooker became a Roman Catholic, and attended St. Francis of Assisi Church. After it burned down, he created a major painting for it, The Seven Sacraments. Until his death, Tooker lived and worked in in Harland, Vermont.
George Tooker is represented in museum collections across the country, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and National Museum of American Art.
He has had numerous museum exhibitions over the years, such as a retrospective, George Tooker: Paintings, 1947-1973, organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California, in 1974; George Tooker: Paintings and Working Drawings at the Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond, Virginia, in 1989; 50 Years of Painting and Study Drawings at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1994; and George Tooker: A Retrospective at the National Academy Museum, New York, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, in 2008-09.
His most recent exhibition was George Tooker: Studies for Paintings at DC Moore Gallery, New York, in 2009. The 2007 National Medal of Arts was awarded to painter George Tooker and presented by President Bush on November 15, 2007 in an East Room ceremony (picutred here).
Mr. Tooker received the award for ìhis paintings that combine realism and symbolism, transforming scenes of American life into iconic images. His metaphysical works reveal manís journey from despair to triumph.î The National Medal of Arts is a presidential initiative managed by the National Endowment for the Arts.
His good friend Lincoln Kirstein once characterized his work as Magic Realism, which has since been frequently used to describe his paintings. Tooker never cared much for that designation, however, because of the connotations of fantasy and Surrealism. "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," he once said.
