George Tooker
Having completed his English degree at Harvard, Tooker went to New York in 1943 to study at the Art Students League, where he worked for two years with Reginald Marsh. Like his friends Jared French and Paul Cadmus, Tooker paints in egg tempera and borrows compositional arrangements from the Renaissance Italians, but his thematic ties are with the existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Many of Tooker's paintings contain a strong element of implicit social comment, and he creates silent theaters in which reality is transformed into deadeningly repetitive drama. He uses precise, geometric architectural structures as backdrops for his protagonists, who often appear as shrouded, shapeless masses contained within boxes or cubicles. Human isolation, self-alienation, and spiritually void rituals are recurring themes in his work.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987
