CAPTURING MODERN ANXIETIES – George Tooker: modeled sculpture forms and mask like faces

GEORGE TOOKER 1/4 – His works often reveal eerie situations, in a mechanical and hostile society. He was born in an August day, in Brooklyn (where he spent the first six years of his life). He took art lessons as a child, and spent much of his young adult life at the Fogg Art Museum. He graduated from Harvard University in 1942. He studied at the Art Students League of New York, and Kenneth Hayes Miller influenced his work. Upon reading Daniel V. Thompson’s “The Practice of Tempera Painting”, he began to paint in the traditional Renaissance painting method.

GEORGE TOOKER 2/4 – While the themes of his works are simple, the overall impact of each is ambiguous and enigmatic. He was particularly interested in Classical sculpture, Flemish and Italian Renaissance painting, Dutch Golden Age painting and Mexican art of the 1920s and 1930s. His first one-man exhibition was at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York in 1951. Early in his career, his work was often compared with painters such as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper. His most well known paintings, carry strong social commentary.

GEORGE TOOKER 3/4 – In many ways, his images reveal the negative side of the subject matter celebrated in Impressionism. Modernity’s anonymity, also with the use of many strong straight lines, culminates in oppressively ordered architecture. In 1966, modern life becomes a prison of soulless ritual devoid of individuality in his “Landscape with Figures”. The individuals represented, are generalized with mask-like faces, and stripped of detail. The people he depicts, are rarely overcome by emotion, and seldom convey individuality. Themes his works focus on include love and death (but also religious faith, sex and grief, alienation.

GEORGE TOOKER 4/4 – As he said: “I am after reality, painting impressed on the mind so hard that it recurs as a dream, but I am not after dreams as such, or fantasy.” He was an American figurative painter, but some of his works are associated with Magic realism, Photorealism, Social realism, and Surrealism. His subjects (often of mixed sexual and racial features), are often obscured by heavy clothing, and appear shapeless, within their own dull worlds. His subjects are depicted naturally, as in a photograph. His haunting images of trapped clerical workers and forbidding government offices, expressed a peculiarly 20th-century brand, made of anxiety and alienation. He died at the age of 90 in his home in Hartland, Vermont.

To pursue this issue, you can also read:

http://meetingbenches.com/2016/11/george-tooker-19202011-american-painter-paint-situations-powerful-mythic-overtones/