Dated Web objects 1960 and after

George Tooker

Date: 1963

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1992.168

Text Entries: Born in New York, George Tooker began painting lessons at the age of seven. He later studied English at Harvard University where he became aware of the work of the Mexican painters José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their unabashed depictions of and comments on social conditions greatly appealed to Tooker and came to serve as an ideal for him: art as a forum for social change. At a time best known for abstract art, Tooker's preference for figurative representation stands out. His painting technique, however, is equally fascinating. Using egg tempera according to a fifteenth century formula, Tooker sized, primed, sketched and painted with deliberation and care, a painstaking process that allowed for the completion of only four to six paintings each year. This process of deliberation, of even mental control, always underlies his enigmatic images. In Highway, Tooker's technique is brought to a high degree of finish and creates a disquieting image of disrupted order. A decade after Highway, Tooker completed Window VII (Desdemona), the sixth painting in his "windows" series. Ultimately consisting of nine numbered paintings, the series was initially started shortly after Tooker's move to Brooklyn Heights in the early 1950s. Tooker utilizes the traditional convention of a window as a framing device to push his figures forward to the picture plane and place them in shallow relief. The drawn curtain reveals a young nude white woman and over her shoulder in the painting's upper left corner, the emerging face of a black man. The viewer is left to decipher the suggested narrative. If, as the title suggests, this is Othello and Desdemona from Shakespeare's play Othello, the highly-charged, mysterious atmosphere of the painting also forebodes tragedy.