George Tooker - Hardcover

Garver, Thomas H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566400694 ISBN 13: 9781566400695

Publisher: Pomegranate, 1992

Synopsis

Mystery, magic, ambiguity, symbolism, classical form, and masterful technique characterize the art of George Tooker. For over forty-five years, Tooker has painted haunting psychological landscapes that explore the human condition of modern society with the traditional medium of egg tempera, employing the exacting detail and representational techniques of Renaissance masters. The absorbing images both enchant and disquiet us in their forceful depiction of the complexities of our age while clearly demonstrating the artist's love of composition and human form.
All his most famous and most frequently reproduced "public" paintings are here: The Subway, Government Bureau, The Waiting Room, Landscape with Figures, Corporate Decision, and the recent Terminal. These images of contemporary men and women within almost allegorical tableaux powerfully portray the inability to communicate in times of dehumanizing technological advances, reflecting the conflict between fear and terror and love and beauty in an anonymous bureaucracy from which there is apparently no exit. The "private" paintings - Lovers, Dreamers, Sleepers, Mirrors, and Windows - convey a profound sense of humanism while more romantically and lyrically evoking the same themes of conflict. Here and throughout Tooker's work the commonplace is imbued with a tone of quiet mystery that allows it to become strange and beautiful, touching both our spiritual and sensual lives.
This expanded edition of the 1985 monograph now contains over 145 paintings, including all work completed since 1985, bringing up to date the entire range of Tooker's important and fascinating work. Over 85 excellent color reproductions beautifully capture the luminous quality of the artist's work in egg tempera, and his meticulous painting technique is described in detail through an intimate look into Tooker's studio.
A catalogue raisonne, concise biography, selected bibliography, and lists of public collections, exhibitions, and awards provide the only complete reference source to Tooker's paintings and career.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas H. Garver was the founding director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, California and the director of the Madison Art Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Other positions have included assistant director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and Curator of Exhibitions of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Once you’ve seen a George Tooker painting, you won’t soon forget it, but Tooker’s life and work are not well known. This gap in American art history is splendidly redressed in this volume of lustrous reproductions and informative biographical and critical essays published in conjunction with the first Tooker retrospective in three decades. Born in 1920, Tooker has long been influenced by his love of literature, passion for Renaissance art, and spirituality. After finding a place within a circle of fellow gay artists and writers, including Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and W. H. Auden, Tooker left New York and the postwar action-painting vortex for Vermont, where he still works in the unforgiving medium of egg tempera, creating empathic, haunting paintings of people literally or figuratively boxed in and isolated, such as his most famous work, Subway (1950), in which wary women and men navigate prisonlike halls. Sensitive to prejudice and injustice, concerned with alienation and other maladies of the soul, and critical of corporate culture, Tooker describes his freshly germane work as “protest paintings.” Attuned to life’s mysteries, sorrows, and beauty, Tooker is also a painter of light and love. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Pomegranate
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1566400694
• ISBN 13: 9781566400695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 156