A look into George Tooker (DC Moore Gallery, NYC)

By Steve Barnes Part of an artistic circle that included Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes and Lincoln Kirstein, George Tooker, who died in March at 90, would endure as a figure of interest for sociological reasons alone. But as “Reality Returns as a Dream,” a show of his work that is up through August 5 at the DC Moore Gallery (535 West 25th Street) proves, the reasons why we should still pay attention to Tooker and his work go far beyond who his mentors, friends and lovers were. Tooker was born in Brooklyn in 1920, studying in the early 1940s at the Art Students League in New York. It was there that he first met Paul Cadmus, an artist who brought a sure draftsman’s hand and colorist’s eye to works that often exhibited a bawdy and forthright homoeroticism. The power that Cadmus’s sexuality had to ruffle the feathers of American society was perhaps most famously exhibited in The Fleet’s In, a painting showing sailors on shore leave. Pulled from a 1934 exhibition of WPA art at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, the work was not seen in public again until 1982. While Tooker can in many ways be seen as one of Cadmus’s followers, a look at two paintings both called Coney Island, one painted by Cadmus in 1934, the other painted by Tooker in 1948, shows how Tooker followed in Cadmus’s footsteps while marking out his own distinctive path. Both of the pictures showcase a Rubenseqsue physicality—voluptuous bodies (both male and female) aggressively on display in public. But while Cadmus throws those bodies into a dynamic, every-man-for-himself free-for-all, Tooker shows a much greater sense of decorum. Despite all the bare flesh on display, Tooker’s beachgoers seem almost prim, obediently posing for the artist. In the background, a group of young men appear to be playing football on the beach, but there’s very little sense of motion. In the foreground, a woman tends to an unconscious man, the positions of their bodies strongly bringing a pieta to mind. We are presented with a world that holds its people in, even when they’re at their most exposed.
That sense of people being trapped by their environments, almost as if they were insects under glass, is a thread that runs through the 26 paintings and sketches that are up DC Moore. In the show’s first image, Tree (1965), a woman gazes at us from behind a tree, not acknowledging the man staring at her. Landscape with Figures (1965–66) is something of an office worker’s nightmare, a sea of anxious faces peering up from a forbidding series of cubicles with no exit. And in Tooker’s most well-known image, 1950’s Subway, an apprehensive woman walks down an antiseptic subway corridor in which a series of vaguely threatening characters lurk. Tooker’s pristine compositions take on an even greater sense of formality due to his use of egg tempera, a medium that gives off a glowing, soft tone. At first glance, some of these works, with their classical compositions and muted colors, could be mistaken for ones from hundreds of years ago. But a far more modern sensibility is at work as well. In 1959’s Laundress, a series of clotheslines turn the sky into a patchwork of abstracted shapes while the women’s faces are split into two fractured halves. For me, however, the most striking feature that shows up constantly in this show are the tortured eyes of the people that Tooker depicts. The same anguished eyes of the woman in Subway can be seen in a nearby self-portrait (in which a skeleton lurks behind the artist’s image) painted in 1996. That anguish shows up in the affectless shoppers who wander through a store of faceless items in 1972’s Supermarket, as well as in Corporate Decision (1983), with its poor family in the foreground cowering before a series of suited men in black-and-white passing judgement in the far background. It’s a testament to the helplessness that many of us feel at the hands of a world that does not quite understand us, and it’s the central achievement of Tooker’s art. Also up in a side gallery at DC Moore is “An Intimate Circle,” with paintings and photographs by Tooker, Cadmus, Lynes, and Jared and Margaret French. A kind of scrapbook of the world in which Tooker lived, it provides a nice background to the main show.]]>