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George Tooker
1920–2011
BirthplaceBrooklyn, New York, United States of America
Death placeHartland, Vermont, United States of America
BiographyInspired by early Netherlandish and Italian Renaissance art and contemporary life, George Tooker's haunting paintings and prints combine meticulous representation and a sense of brooding mystery to comment on the human condition. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tooker grew up in suburban Long Island in comfortable circumstances. As a child he took painting lessons from a family friend. Tooker attended Phillips Academy, an elite high school in Andover, Massachusetts, and in 1942 he graduated from Harvard, where he had majored in English and pursued his interest in art. Disturbed by the social inequalities and poverty he encountered in the rural mill towns near Andover and inspired by the politicized work of contemporary Mexican figural painters, he became interested in using his art to affect social change.
After Tooker was discharged from officer training school in the U.S. Marines during World War II due to illness brought on by stress, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. His teachers there included leading social realist painters, notably Reginald Marsh. Tooker was introduced to the traditional medium of egg tempera by painter Paul Cadmus, with whom he spent six months together traveling and studying art in Italy and France in 1949. Later that year, Tooker met painter William Christopher (1923–1973), who became his lifelong companion. In 1953, the Whitney Museum purchased Tooker's best-known painting, Subway (1950), and the artist was commissioned to create set designs for the musical drama The Saint of Bleecker Street by Gian-Carlo Menotti.
By this time, Tooker had begun to receive further recognition for his paintings, beginning with a one-man exhibition at a New York gallery in 1951; four more such shows and many group exhibitions followed. In 1960, Tooker and Christopher left New York City for Vermont, where they had already constructed a weekend home. Tooker taught at the Art Students League between 1965 and 1968, when they established a winter residence on the Mediterranean coast of Spain as Christopher's health deteriorated. Following his partner's death in 1973, Tooker returned to Vermont, where he spent the remainder of his life. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor organized a major traveling retrospective exhibition of his art in 1974.
Typically working on a relatively small scale, Tooker perfected the intimate Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting on wood panel; later, he also took up printmaking. Tooker's early work concerns social and public issues, and stresses the loneliness and alienation of modern urban existence. In the 1970s, the artist began to explore more personal states of being expressed in symbolic imagery, often drawn from the Bible, mythology, and classic literature. In his conservative, painstaking technique, and commitment to symbolic figuration, Tooker, though greatly respected, remained apart from the modernist trends that dominated American art for much of the second half of the twentieth century.
After Tooker was discharged from officer training school in the U.S. Marines during World War II due to illness brought on by stress, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. His teachers there included leading social realist painters, notably Reginald Marsh. Tooker was introduced to the traditional medium of egg tempera by painter Paul Cadmus, with whom he spent six months together traveling and studying art in Italy and France in 1949. Later that year, Tooker met painter William Christopher (1923–1973), who became his lifelong companion. In 1953, the Whitney Museum purchased Tooker's best-known painting, Subway (1950), and the artist was commissioned to create set designs for the musical drama The Saint of Bleecker Street by Gian-Carlo Menotti.
By this time, Tooker had begun to receive further recognition for his paintings, beginning with a one-man exhibition at a New York gallery in 1951; four more such shows and many group exhibitions followed. In 1960, Tooker and Christopher left New York City for Vermont, where they had already constructed a weekend home. Tooker taught at the Art Students League between 1965 and 1968, when they established a winter residence on the Mediterranean coast of Spain as Christopher's health deteriorated. Following his partner's death in 1973, Tooker returned to Vermont, where he spent the remainder of his life. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor organized a major traveling retrospective exhibition of his art in 1974.
Typically working on a relatively small scale, Tooker perfected the intimate Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting on wood panel; later, he also took up printmaking. Tooker's early work concerns social and public issues, and stresses the loneliness and alienation of modern urban existence. In the 1970s, the artist began to explore more personal states of being expressed in symbolic imagery, often drawn from the Bible, mythology, and classic literature. In his conservative, painstaking technique, and commitment to symbolic figuration, Tooker, though greatly respected, remained apart from the modernist trends that dominated American art for much of the second half of the twentieth century.