George Tooker
*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--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.