Philadelphia Weekly

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The career retrospective of 88-year-old American Modernist painter George Tooker at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is a revelation. Tooker was a student of renowned American artist Reginald Marsh and is known as an astute observer of urban humanity. Although Tooker isn’t as well known as his teacher, the artist’s small, dreamy egg tempera paintings are bold and captivating. His subject matter—human interaction, from intimate moments of tenderness to unsettling tableaux of men and women boxed in and dehumanized by government, corporations and the city—is compelling and categorizes him alongside social realist muralists like Diego Rivera.

Tooker, who was active in the Civil Rights movement and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 1965, came of artistic age during the paranoid days of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Works like The Subway and Government Bureau—from a series the artist dubbed his “Protest Paintings”—present a Kafkaesque world in which individuals are lost in blank urban corridors.

The Subway’s labyrinthine walkways, iron bars and turnstile create a dead and odious urban space. People march in step, their eyes blank. The piece perfectly encapsulates the pessimism of the anxious times, and it resonates today as well. Tooker has continued to add to this series over the years.

His works are luminous, built up with many layers of translucent glazes. The colors sing. Tooker studied the Renaissance masters like Piero de la Francesca, and his figures—all imagined; the artist doesn’t work from models or photos—have the poise, dignity, sensuality and solemnity of figures in those ancient works. Often, as in Juke Box, there’s an element of threat implied in Tooker’s work, which he expresses with heightened colors or odd views of the scene. Like Van Gogh and Rembrandt, Tooker has made a study of his own face through self-portraits that show his seriousness of purpose throughout his long career.

A devout Christian who converted to Catholicism in 1976, Tooker’s later works, like Embrace of Peace, II, contain elements of a dreamy spirituality.

PAFA Curator of Modern Art Robert Cozzolino recently uncovered a lost Tooker painting, Laundress, which was owned by a private Philadelphia collector. “It’s an important early work that the co-curator and I were trying to track down but had few leads,” Cozzolino says. “One of distinctions is that it is the only oil painting Tooker did.” The collector came forward to lend the work to the show, which now includes the preparatory drawing for Laundress as well as the painting.

Organized by PAFA, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and the National Academy Museum in New York, this is the first major museum retrospective of Tooker’s work in 30 years.

For more on the Philadelphia art scene go to theartblog.org.

George Tooker: “A Retrospective.” $10-$15. Through April 5, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad St. 215.972.7600. www.pafa.org
New Perspectives on George Tooker: Fri., March 20, 9am-5pm and Sat., March 21, 9am-3pm. $30-$60. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad St. 215.972.7600. www.pafa.org