George Clair Tooker, Jr.

About

George Clair Tooker, Jr. was born on August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York, and became one of America's preeminent figurative painters. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1942 with a degree in English. Disturbed by social inequalities and poverty he witnessed in rural mill towns, Tooker became committed to using art as a vehicle for social change, inspired by the politicized work of contemporary Mexican figural painters. Tooker studied at the Art Students League in New York from 1943 to 1945 under Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Harry Sternberg, and later studied privately with Paul Cadmus. He became a leading figure in the Symbolic Realism movement alongside his close friends Paul Cadmus and Jared French. Tooker perfected the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting on wood panel, working on a relatively small scale and producing only about two paintings per year due to his meticulous approach to geometric design and symmetry. Tooker's career divided into two distinct phases: his early work focused on social and public issues depicting the alienation and anxiety of modern urban life, while after his conversion to Catholicism in the 1970s, he explored more personal states of being expressed through symbolic imagery drawn from the Bible, mythology, and classic literature. He taught at the Art Students League between 1965 and 1968, and later established a winter residence on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Following his partner Christopher's death in 1973, Tooker returned to Vermont, where he spent the remainder of his life until his death on March 27, 2011.

Symbolic Realism, Magic Realism, Social Realism, Photorealism. Tooker depicted subjects naturally as in photographs but used flat tones, ambiguous perspective, and alarming juxtapositions to suggest an imagined or dreamed reality. His work is characterized by dreamlike imagery, androgynous figures, geometric design, symmetry, and examinations of the troubled relationship between society and the self.