Highway

George Tooker's Highway is a haunting fantasy of a roadblock. Three cars, their snarlingly aggressive, fang-like grilles mirroring their drivers' frustration, are immobilized by the authoritative gesture of a mysterious figure completely clothed in black, his head blocked from view by a red reflector he brandishes as if commanding the viewer himself to halt. Movement is thwarted by the screen of signs sporting downward-pointing arrows and the barriers that hem in the cars, their striated grilles echoing the vivid zebra stripes. Globular street lamps trace the highway's path backward under a lowering sky tinged unnatural colors as if by smog, but the view is otherwise cut off by the road barriers; only the tops of old-fashioned red-brick buildings and broad black smoke-stacks are visible above them, signs of an unseen ravaged industrial landscape.

Early in his career, Tooker applied his fastidious technique, inspired by early Renaissance painting, to the negative social effects of such aspects of contemporary American society as bureaucracy and technology. This work, according to the artist, was intended to express "how much I hated highways."1 In the early 1950s, when Tooker painted it, the United States contained about six percent of the world's population but sixty percent of all automobiles, the result of postwar prosperity and suburban development. The nation's highway system, which dated to the 1920s, had deteriorated by the 1950s due to wartime neglect of maintenance and greatly increased traffic volume, and roadblocks were a frequent annoyance. The highway and the private automobile, emblems as well as agents of individual freedom for many of Tooker's contemporaries, serve in Highway as symbols of a complex of social ills that plague modern life: the privileging of the autonomous, competitive ego over communal responsibility, selfish materialism, and the destruction of nature by development and attendant pollution. The traffic controller, an ominous figure of faceless authority whose all-black attire suggests a patrolman's uniform, may symbolize death, with its irrefutable power to bring the self-absorbed busyness of human activity to its ultimate halt.

Arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein, an early champion of Tooker's work, described him as a "symbolic realist" for his manipulation of commonplace objects as powerful symbols in works that transpose everyday reality into an otherworldly mirror image. Tooker was one of several artists who applied traditional techniques to this mode of interpreting the world around them. His chosen medium of egg tempera painting on wooden panel enhances the hushed perfection of his perfectly modeled forms and highly finished surfaces, so jarringly at odds with the scene's menacing effect. Tooker's difficult and painstaking method of painting, which limited his output to no more than four to six paintings per working year, further embodies the artist's protest against the mindless uniformity of modern culture.

1. Tooker quoted in Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker (New York: Clarkson N, Potter, Inc., 1985), 34.

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The Surreal City: 1930s–1950s, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, New York (organizer). Venues: Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, New York, May 3–July 11, 1985; Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois, July 19–October 13, 1985; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, October 27–December 15, 1985; Fred L. Emerson Gallery at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, January 4–February 10, 1986; High Museum of Art at Georgia Pacific Center, Atlanta, Georgia, February 24–April 25, 1986. [exh. cat.]

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