Culturally Curious: George Tooker
On Thursday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m. I watched a webinar via Zoom that focused on the life and work of American painter George Clair Tooker. The talk, called George Tooker: Modern Life & Magical Realism, was lead by Jane Oneail of Culturally Curious. I last heard Oneail speak a month ago in May when she presented Revolutionary Design: Modern Architecture in New England. Like last time, the event was sponsored by the Greater Manchester Integrated Library Cooperative or GMILCS, which describes itself as “a nonprofit consortium of public and academic libraries in New Hampshire”.
The talk began with an introduction to the life of George Tooker. He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1920 to an Episcopalian family. His mother was half Cuban, and Tooker considered himself to be mixed-race but passed as White. He began painting around 1927 at age seven, and by the time he was a junior in high school, he was accepted into the prestigious Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. After graduating, he studied English Literature at Harvard but felt like an outsider. He moved back to New York City to study at The Art Students League of New York under the mentorship of Reginald Marsh. Known as a social realist artist who depicted the gritty life of modern New Yorkers, Marsh’s stylistic emphasis on movement, fashion, and the printed word heavily influenced Tooker.
Also at this time, Tooker met friends and sometimes romantic partners, Paul Cadmus and William “Bill” Rodolphus Christopher. All three painted modern city life using egg tempera, a type of paint first invented in the European Medieval period before the existence of oil and acrylic paints. While Cadmus moved on, Tooker and Christopher settled in rural Vermont where Christopher became a professor at Dartmouth College. Throughout this time, the pair included people of all backgrounds in their art. They joined the NAACP at Dartmouth and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, AL. After Christopher passed away in 1973, Tooker converted to Catholicism. He dedicated the remaining thirty-eight years of his life to attending church, sketching, and painting. Oneail argues that Tooker is “one of the most distinct [and] underappreciated American artists in the 20th century” due to his quiet lifestyle. Even so, Tooker received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2007 at the age of eighty-six. He passed away at home four years later in 2011.
For most of the talk, Oneail described Tooker’s art as fitting into at least one of four categories: social commentary, windows & doors, light & love, and sleep & death. In Lunch (1964), Tooker illustrates what Oneail described as a “breakroom from Hell”, a crowd of people wearing beige and eating identical bland lunches. At the center of the portrait is a single Black man among a sea of White people. This strange political statement came at a time when lunch counters were desegregated across the American South. Another painting with a similar message was Supper (1963). In this painting, a Black man appears in the role of Jesus blessing the bread during the Supper at Emmaus, which appears in Luke 24:13-35. The White men on either side represent disciples who did not recognize Jesus until he gave them the bread.
Tooker’s paintings featuring windows and doors are sometimes a realistic peek into the private lives of city dwellers or a surrealist representation of suffering, grief, and death. A favorite image from the session was The Lesson (1974), where a pair of ghoulish, androgynous figures stand on either side of the door, one in light and one in darkness. Many commenters on the call agreed that the figures looked like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies.
Another theme in Tooker paintings is the mystical play of light combined with scenes of young couples in love enjoying each other’s company while at a party or in nature. One colorful example is Jukebox (1953). The woman in a red dress, a popular character in Tooker paintings, leans against a jukebox illuminating her face from below. The style of lighting was similar to chiaroscuro, a technique used by early 17th century French Baroque artist George de La Tour.
The final category of Tooker’s paintings, sleep and death, demonstrated common western art techniques of showing whether a subject was asleep or dead. Living people have an arm over their head, while dead people have arms at their side. More obviously, shrouded skeletons appearing from a hole in a busy city sidewalk are dead, and those in the painting will soon join them. More unsettling is Sleepers II (1959), where seven identical men lay in a cloud-like bed with their eyes open, unclear to the viewer whether they are dead or alive.
Oneail’s fast-paced and enthusiastic talk on the life of George Tooker highlighted the unique work of a relatively unknown artist. While I personally do not care for his art, I appreciate his talent and dedication to working in a nearly forgotten medium, creating subtle contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, and observing of the human condition.