George Tooker
(American, 1920–2011)
Biography
George Tooker was an American artist known for his Social Realist tempera paintings of mid-century New York. Many of Tooker’s works, such as The Subway (1950), focused on urban loneliness and disillusionment, in which figures seen trapped by their surroundings. “Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life,” he once reflected. “There are as many solutions as there are human beings.” Born on August 5, 1920 in Brooklyn, NY, he engaged with art in his youth, and later frequented the Fogg Art Museum while obtaining an English degree from Harvard University. Before embarking on his painting career in late 1940s, studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League of New York. Though he remained a devout social activist, over the decades, the artist’s work became more symbolic and dreamlike, as seen in his Embrace I (1979). Before his death on March 27, 2011 in Hartland, VT, Tooker's oeuvre was honored by retrospectives at both the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.
George Tooker Artworks
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