George Tooker / Coney Island of the Mind

Subway, 1950
George Tooker

Coney Island of the Mind

George Tooker at DC Moore Gallery

By Will Heinrich

6/14/2011 8:00pm

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

Claustrophobia isn’t quite the right word when the tunnels go on forever. Using the endless and endlessly unwelcoming tiled surfaces of the New York City underground, George Tooker’s painting Subway gets at a dread that seems, despite its broad resonance, particular to the year in which it was painted, 1950.

A woman in a red dress under a blue trench coat stands lost and paralyzed between a high turnstile that cages in more than it leads out and the uncanny metal bannisters of another staircase leading down. Behind her shoulders are two incarnations of Cold War paranoia, staring men in fedoras, identical except for the color of their trench coats, buttoned to the throat. (One is brown, but the other is tan.) More trench coats appear in shallow alcoves in the wall and extending into the background. The angle at which the tunnels meet makes for a fish-eye panorama, but the perspective squeezes the other way, so that the composition blurs and trembles. The woman holds a large, mannish hand to her abdomen; there’s nothing to do but trudge on.

Mr. Tooker, who was born in New York in 1920, died in March, and DC Moore Gallery has mounted a memorial show that includes, among other loans, Subway, his most famous painting, borrowed from the Whitney Museum.   Mr. Tooker adopted egg tempera as his primary medium while studying at the Art Students League in the 1940’s. The luminous opacity of tempera is precisely appropriate to his work at both its best and its worst: when his work succeeds, it aspires, like an ikon, to be looked not into but through. When it fails, it flirts with the narcissism of self-effacement, using the language of spiritual yearning to show a world colored by unconfronted psychological traumas.

Coney Island, 1947
George Tooker

In 1948, Mr. Tooker found religion on the beach. In the heavy foreground of Coney Island—hidden under the shadow of the boardwalk—a handsome swimsuit Jesus reclines against a red cushion. (He isn’t dead—he’s only sleeping.) His warmly glowing skin is equally informed by the Renaissance, the artist-employing Works Progress Administration and homoerotics. A cornflower Mary in a pale blue swimsuit leans over him tenderly, while behind his head, playing Joseph and the younger Mary as elements of a naturalistic annunciation, are a shirtless man standing watch and his young wife, pulling on a dress over her head. A heavy woman in a pink swimsuit and blue wimple, Saint Anne, sits cross-legged at the bather’s feet. Further away but more brightly lit, at the bottom of the wooden steps that lead down from the walkway raised over the sacred swimmer, half-naked men, women and children run and play in the sand. A muscular man in red briefs leans back to throw a baseball; the catcher is out of sight. Minuscule in the distance, in the middle of the sky, a man who’s jumped off the end of the pier extends his arms in cruciform.

Much later in life, after the death of his longtime companion, Mr. Tooker, who was raised as an Episcopalian, began practicing as a Catholic and painted a large altarpiece for a church near his home in Vermont.

The dome-shaped birdwatchers again puts God between the viewer and the painting’s depths, this time in the form of lithe and delicate little birds in the branches of a tree in Central Park. The leader of a party of birdwatchers, a man in coat and scarf, spreads his hands in reverent wonder. Behind them, rendered with a pretty, late-Medieval artificiality, rises an enormous boulder. But behind the boulder, pathways extend under bridges, open to the sky but no less confining than the tunnels of Subway. The world of the painter, the world of the viewer and even the world depicted are all equally constrained—the only freedom is on the surface. It may be the freedom of the mysterious meeting, across time and place, of artist and viewer, or of spirit and flesh—but it may simply be the sensual escape that the artist himself found in the act of painting.

In 1960, Mr. Tooker moved to rural Vermont, and while he continued using simple allegorical scenes (DC Moore describes them as “without traditional narrative content”), most of the paintings that postdate Coney Island, Birdwatchers and Subway are closely focused on the interior. A few simple colors alternate like the notes of a pentatonic scale. Faces and heads become more phallic or neanderthal, less distinct from one another; edges close in; you think of a child pouring all his attention into a fantasy to shut out a larger and more dangerous world.

In Embrace of Peace, a man and a woman reach for each other from either end of a long canvas. Her sleeves are a sunlit Byzantine red. Behind them is a crowd of couples embracing, but those embraces have nothing to do with their own. In Moonrise, Mr. Tooker turns his attention to a more personal meeting of the sacred and profane. Two men peer out from under an orange and yellow blanket at a rolling green field; blue hills recede toward a darkening sky under a rising white moon. Their bed is the world and the world, full of wonder, is their bed.

http://www.observer.com/2011/06/coney-island-of-the-mind-george-tooker-at-dc-moore-gallery/

George Tooker by Chris Kearin



Voice I, 1963



READ TOOKER'S BIOGRAPHY HERE

GEORGE TOOKER

(1920 – 2011)

By Chris Kearin

In January 2009 I was able to visit the Tooker retrospective then on display at the National Academy Museum. It was my first visit to the relatively small Fifth Avenue institution, which at the time was struggling and in the news as a result of some controversial deaccessionings. Whatever the financial state of the museum, the fourth floor rooms devoted to the show were suitably homey and intimate. Tooker was an unassuming, private person; his canvases are on the small side and due to the demands of the egg tempera technique he employed his body of work is not as large as one might expect from a man who was active well into his eighties.

Although he has been sometimes categorized as a “magical realist,” that well-worn term seems particularly inappropriate in his case, for his work was “magical” or “fantastic” only in the most superficial way, and although he was a figurative painter he was no realist in the conventional sense. The show included early and somewhat strident paintings like Children and Spastics, Dance, and A Game of Chess, well-known works from the 1950s onward, like Government Bureau (below) and Waiting Room II, that give evidence of his political and social concerns, as well as more optimistic, religiously tinged works like Supper and Orant. There were several self-portraits and enough other works to represent the range of his artistic interests. An excellent catalog, edited by Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, documented the show and provided biographical and critical illumination.

 

Government Bureau, 1950



Much has been made of Tooker's formal conversion to Catholicism in the 1970s following the death of his longtime partner William Christopher, and of the ways in which that affected the course of his later work. (Tooker's mother was Cuban and the family had switched from Catholicism to Episcopalianism in the painter's youth.) It's true that after that time he executed several specifically religious commissions, in particular for the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Windsor, Vermont, but there is no clear division between his work before and after his conversion. In fact it is not always easy to say which of Tooker's paintings are to be regarded as evidence of alienation and which are to be regarded as expressing hope and communion with others.

A case in point is Landscape with Figures, which depicts, almost entirely in shades of reddish orange, what appear to be office workers sunk in a honeycomb of cubicles.

  

Landscape with Figures

We look down over the horizontal array of boxes, but interestingly the perspective also evokes the vertical span of a skyscraper, with the tops of the cubicles functioning as windows. Most of the figures appear asleep or entranced, yet in the rows nearest to us there are several figures with eyes open who may be about to emerge from the corporate catacombs of the Organization Man.

 

Subway, 1950


           In discussing Subway (above), which dates from 1950, Tooker used a combination of religious and mythological imagery:

         I was thinking of a large modern city, as a kind of limbo. The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself. Its being underground with great weight overhead was important. I thought of the labyrinth of the Minotaur and the unreal perspectives of a Hall of Mirrors.

The painting has three vertical levels, linked by staircases, and the downward staircase could be regarded as leading into the underworld, with the staircase up to the street providing a possible route of ascent and escape (which, however, no one is making use of). The central plane would then be a kind of intermediate world, a Purgatory characterized by suffering but also offering the possibility of redemption to those who are able to break free from the conformity and isolation of modern urban life.

In Waiting Room (from 1957, not to be confused with the more explicitly political Waiting Room II from 1982) we look in on another bleak scene, this time of sullen, lifeless figures standing in what appears to be a combination locker room and waiting area.

 

Waiting Room, 1957

The only face displaying any animation is the one depicted on the back cover of a magazine that one woman is holding aloft, obscuring her own face. The strong suggestion of the painting is that what is being awaited is death, a perhaps not entirely unwelcome end to hollow, unhappy, isolated lives. But there is one touch of tenderness: in one of the stalls a woman grasps the arm of a downcast man, perhaps as she says goodbye. The colors of the clothes the figures are wearing may indicate how close to death they are, as the more apparently vigorous figures are brightly dressed, the evidently moribund drably clothed; the woman in stall No. 114 seems to be slowly draining from one state to another.

There are many other aspects to Tooker's work, many of them admirably clarified by the exhibition catalog. His strong sympathy with the civil rights movement can be seen in a number of paintings that depict African-American or mixed-race figures, notably Supper from 1963 and Dark Angel from 1996, and there are several paintings that are simply splendid and beautiful, like his self-portraits from 1969 and 1994 and the lovely Girl with a Basket from 1987-88.

Girl with a Basket, 1978-88

His work may convey a sense of mystery and otherworldliness, but in the end Tooker, dark or light, was an artist fully engaged with the human condition.

Posted by Chris Kearin at 9:33

Saturday, April 02, 2011