Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. George Tooker (with a nod to Alberto Manguel) In the 1980s, Alberto Manguel edited a quintet of short story anthologies that were embellished, at least in their Clarkson Potter editions in the US, with striking cover images taken from the work of the painter George Tooker. (I'm not positive, but I think the volumes may have been originally published in Canada with different cover treatments.) The first and heftiest, and probably the best as well, was Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature, which collected supernatural tales by seventy or so writers, among them Italo Calvino, John Collier, Silvina Ocampo, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jules Verne. The image used on the cover is just a tiny detail of Tooker's best known painting, Subway, the entire canvas of which was reproduced, in miniature, on the back of the book, perhaps (though I'm just guessing) at the artist's request. No designer is credited on that volume, but the subsequent Black Water 2, which used Tooker's Voice I, does credit Renato Stanisic.
In addition to Other Fires, shown above, which uses a detail of Tooker's Gypsy, I'm aware of two other Manguel anthologies with Tooker covers, neither of which I was able to obtain an acceptable scan of. They are Dark Arrows: Great Stories of Revenge and Evening Games: Tales of Parents and Children. All five appear to be out of print in the US and with these covers, though they may be available elsewhere and aren't difficult to find second-hand. Tooker's fairly limited palette and reliance on simple, usually rather heavy forms work well with the block lettering and stark geometry of the cover designs. The dark purple title in the first Black Water volume and the olive numeral 2 in the second draw on colors from the original artwork, as does the reddish orange title of Other Fires. The interesting thing is that, as eerie and ominous as the covers of the first pair are — and they really do add something to the pleasure of the books — they give a somewhat misleading impression of the nature of Tooker's art. Although he is sometimes categorized as a “magic realist,” the term seems singularly inapt, for his work is “magical” or “fantastic” only in the most superficial way, and though he is a figurative painter he is no kind of realist. Over the holidays I was able to take in the recent Tooker retrospective at the National Academy Museum (it has since closed but will be moving later this month to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). It was my first visit to the relatively small Fifth Avenue museum, which has received some unwanted publicity lately because of some controversial deaccessionings undertaken for budgetary reasons. Whatever the financial state of the institution, the fourth floor rooms devoted to the show were suitably homey and intimate. Tooker is an unassuming, private person; his canvases are on the small side and due to the demands of the egg tempera technique he employs his body of work is not as large as one might expect from a man who is now well into his eighties. The show included early and somewhat strident paintings like Children and Spastics, Dance, and A Game of Chess, well-known works from the 1950s onward, like Government Bureau and Waiting Room II, that give evidence of his political and social concerns, as well as more optimistic, religiously tinged works like Supper and Orant. There were several self-portraits and enough other works to represent the range of his artistic interests. An excellent catalogue, edited By Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, documents the show and provides biographical and critical illumination. Much has been made of Tooker's formal conversion to Catholicism in the 1970s following the death of his longtime partner William Christopher, and of the ways in which that has steered the course of his later work. (Tooker's mother was Cuban and the family had switched from Catholicism to Episcopalianism in the painter's youth.) It's true that since that time he has executed several specifically religious commissions, in particular for the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Windsor, Vermont, but there is no clear division between his work before and after his conversion. In fact it is not always easy to say which of Tooker's paintings are to be regarded as evidence of alienation and which are to be regarded as expressing hope and communion with others. A case in point is Landscape with Figures, which depicts, almost entirely in shades of reddish orange, what appear to be office workers sunk in a honeycomb of cubicles. We look down over the horizontal array of cubicles, but interestingly the perspective also evokes the vertical span of a skyscraper, with the tops of the cubicles functioning as windows. Most of the figures appear asleep or entranced, yet in the rows nearest to us there are several figures with eyes open who may be about to emerge from the corporate catacombs of the Organization Man. In discussing Subway, which dates from 1950, Tooker has himself used a combination of religious and mythological imagery: I was thinking of a large modern city, as a kind of limbo. The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself. Its being underground with great weight overhead was important. I thought of the labyrinth of the Minotaur and the unreal perspectives of a Hall of Mirrors.The painting has three vertical levels, linked by staircases, and the downward staircase could be regarded as leading into the underworld, with the staircase up to the street providing a possible route of ascent and escape (which, however, none of the figures is making use of). The central plane would then be a kind of intermediate world (strictly speaking a Purgatory rather than a Limbo) characterized by suffering but also offering the possibility of redemption to those who are able to break free from the conformity and isolation of modern urban life. In Waiting Room (1957, not to be confused with the more explicitly political Waiting Room II from 1982) we are presented with another bleak scene, this time of sullen, lifeless figures standing in what appears to be a combination locker room and waiting area. The only face displaying any animation is the one on the back cover of a magazine that one woman is holding aloft, obscuring her own face. The strong suggestion of the painting is that what is being awaited is death, a welcome end to hollow, unhappy, isolated lives. But there is one touch of tenderness: in one of the stalls a woman grasps the arm of a downcast man, perhaps her husband, perhaps in farewell. The colors of the clothes the figures wear may indicate how close to death they are, as the more apparently vigorous figures are brightly dressed, the evidently moribund drably clothed, and one woman towards the background seems to be slowly draining from one state to another. There are many other aspects to Tooker's work, many of them admirably clarified by the exhibition catalogue. His strong sympathy with the civil rights movement can be seen in a number of paintings that depict African-American or mixed-race figures, notably Supper from 1963 and Dark Angel from 1996, and there are several paintings that are simply splendid and beautiful, like his self-portraits from 1969 and 1994 and the lovely Girl with a Basket from 1987-88. His work may convey a sense of mystery and otherworldliness, but in the end Tooker, dark or light, is an artist fully engaged with the human condition. I have not included images of Tooker's work, except for the book covers for which he granted the publishers specific license, out of respect for the rights of a living artist. Many of his paintings can be found by searching the web, but obtaining the catalogue or viewing the travelling exhibition — or both — is highly recommended. January 9, 2009 [ Permalink ]
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