George Tooker's works are associated with Magic realism, Social realism, Photorealism, and Surrealism.
26 Facts About George Tooker
2.
George Tooker's subjects are depicted naturally as in a photograph, but the images use flat tones, an ambiguous perspective, and alarming juxtapositions to suggest an imagined or dreamed reality.
3.
George Tooker was born on August 5,1920, in Brooklyn, New York where he spent the first six years of his life.
4.
George Tooker was raised by his mother, Angela Montejo Roura, who was of English, German and Spanish-Cuban descent and his father George Clair Tooker who was of English and French descent.
5.
George Tooker took art lessons as a child and spent much of his young adult life at the Fogg Art Museum.
6.
George Tooker attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University with an English degree in 1942, after which and enlisted in the Officer Candidates School, but was discharged for medical reasons.
7.
George Tooker spent the late 1940s and early 1950s in Brooklyn.
8.
George Tooker studied at the Art Students League of New York under Reginald Marsh from 1943 to 1945.
9.
George Tooker regarded Harry Sternberg a good teacher at the League due to his pointed, challenging questions.
10.
George Tooker acknowledged the need for other art to support his development process.
11.
George Tooker spent much of his free time reading painting and sculpture books, studying the works of antiquity up to 20th-century art in an effort to augment his artistic vision.
12.
George Tooker was particularly interested in Classical sculpture, Flemish painting and sculpture, Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, Dutch Golden Age painting, 17th-century French art, Neue Sachlichkeit art, and Mexican art of the 1920s and 1930s.
13.
Some individuals that influenced George Tooker include Italian artists Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca; American artists Jared French, Edward Hopper, Paul Cadmus, Honore Desmond Sharrer, and Henry Koerner.
14.
Early in his career, George Tooker's work was often compared with painters such as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and his close friends Jared French and Paul Cadmus.
15.
George Tooker saw modern society as behaving in this same way.
16.
The people George Tooker depicts are rarely overcome by emotion, never strut, and seldom convey individuality.
17.
George Tooker was deeply concerned with the apparent failure to understand and communicate within American society.
18.
George Tooker's elaborately painted seven-panel piece The Seven Sacraments is located in his local church in Windsor, Vermont.
19.
For several decades, George Tooker painted with little recognition, completing one to three paintings each year.
20.
George Tooker spent four to six intensely focused hours each day, six days a week, for roughly four months fine-tuning each piece, slowly and deliberately building up color and dimension.
21.
George Tooker devoted numerous paintings to a single theme, investigating many possible variations to fully express the complex ideas conveyed.
22.
George Tooker grew up in an affluent family, and his work reflects both his privilege and his empathy for those with less.
23.
George Tooker is featured, often nude, in many of their images from that period.
24.
George Tooker taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1965 to 1968.
25.
George Tooker's faith was very important to him, as he was very much involved with his local church.
26.
George Tooker died at the age of 90 in his Hartland, Vermont, home due to kidney failure.