Art: Beautiful work, long neglected, is given its due

George Tooker, born in 1920, is an artist from another era who is long overdue for some serious museum attention. His exquisitely crafted paintings, often hauntingly beautiful and sometimes enigmatic, continue to validate a tradition in which art emerges from methodical preparation and painstaking technique.

It's been three decades since Tooker's last solo museum show. Now he's being featured at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in a modestly scaled retrospective organized by the academy and two other institutions, the National Academy of Design in New York and the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art.

Since the early 1950s, when he became a first-magnitude art star with socially incisive images such as Subway, Tooker has been one of the more fascinating painters in America.

He is often characterized as a realist, yet eerie scenarios like Waiting Room, Government Bureau and Subway - perhaps his most famous work - are more properly regarded as allegories of the 20th-century human condition.

In those Cold War days, Tooker's paintings pointedly evoked states of anxiety, fear, alienation, isolation and oppression. They're very unsettling even today.

They're occasionally somewhat surreal, but Tooker does not construct his narratives from dreams, fantasies or subconscious hot flashes. His art is solidly grounded in reality, yet, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, it's one step removed from life in the flesh. It can never be mistaken for the more cinematic realism practiced by the Ashcan painters early in the last century or the Social Realists of the 1930s.

Tooker also has been identified as an alternative modernist, a counterpoint to the abstract expressionists of the 1950s and '60s. His method is antithetical to theirs in every way. Their work is large-scale, abstract, intuitive and energized by emotion. His is domestic-scale, figurative, meticulous and morally didactic.

It's a bit difficult to reconcile the idea of Tooker as a "modern" painter with the fact that, especially in early works such as Bird Watchers, he looks so much like the 15th-century Italian master Piero della Francesca in contemporary dress.

Tooker admired Piero and his Renaissance contemporaries, and developed a style that reprises Piero's hieratic figures, so precisely drawn and formally composed.

From the mid-1940s, Tooker painted in egg tempera, a fast-drying medium that precludes improvisation and requires an artist to proceed deliberately. Tempera encouraged precise, lapidary brushwork that perfectly complements Tooker's subdued, somewhat static compositional recipes.

There's plenty of emotion in powerful paintings such as Subway - a group of people seemingly trapped in an urban labyrinth - but it's sublimated rather than animated. Tooker creates moods that can be disturbingly intense, and that don't dissipate with repeated viewing.

Tooker is a native of Brooklyn who grew up in Bellport, Long Island. Unusually well-educated for a visual artist, he graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard College (1942), where he majored in English literature.

After Harvard, he studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan for two years, mainly under Reginald Marsh, known for his animated scenes of urban life. Marsh was expert at depicting the turbulent energy of crowds; Tooker, by contrast, would develop a quieter, more solitary vision.

Tooker met William Christopher, a painter and cabinetmaker who would become his life companion, in 1949. Four years later, they bought a house in Brooklyn Heights. The experience of first renovating, then living in, the old brownstone inspired a number of paintings, particularly Government Bureau of 1956.

In 1960, Tooker and Christopher moved permanently to Hartland, Vt., near Dartmouth College, into a house they designed and constructed. During the 1960s, they were active in the civil rights movement; each made a series of paintings honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other movement leaders.

The academy exhibition presents two Tookers - the mordant social critic and activist of the 1950s, '60s and early '70s and the more conciliatory religious messenger of the last three decades. The hinge point of the transition is the artist's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1976, three years after Christopher died.

Tooker the social critic not only has sharper claws but is also more inventive visually, which is why paintings like Government Bureau, Ward, and the chilling Landscape With Figures - humans imprisoned in a warren of tiny cubicles - not only still resonate but can also even be mildly frightening.

Tooker's religious testimony is considerably more anodyne, in its message and even its warm, soothing palette. Many of his figures continue to be blandly unexpressive, but they've lost their capacity to disturb.

The later paintings are more about love, reconciliation and spiritual harmony. One notable exception is Waiting Room II of 1982, which depicts another Subway-like convergence of tunnels in which figures sit in pits.

The exhibition of approximately 60 paintings and drawings is installed more or less chronologically, which makes this dichotomy of attitude readily apparent. The tension and anxiety of the early years ease as one crosses the divide into the sunnier, born-again arena of affirmation typified by the picture Father and Child.

Academy curator Robert Cozzolino, who collaborated on the checklist with his counterparts at the other two participating museums, has installed the show in the academy's largest exhibition space, the Fisher Brooks Gallery.

Because most of the paintings are small, they look somewhat diminished by the scale of this room, despite the insertion of several alcoves into the space. Yet in an odd way, this effect is sympathetic to the general spirit of Tooker's earlier work, in which alienation is a prominent component.

Tooker's paintings may be small, but their vision, which encompasses all humanity, is expansive. In resisting repression by government and institutions, his art is ultimately life-affirming, most obviously so in the later work. Achieving this by evoking fear and anxiety might seem paradoxical, yet one comes away from the exhibition elevated rather than depressed.

So, is Tooker a modernist? Absolutely. He might speak Old Master language, but he has used it both to comment on contemporary social issues and to create poignant statements about faith and the restorative power of human interaction. If you transported him back to Piero's time, he just wouldn't fit.

The George Tooker retrospective continues in the Hamilton building of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, through April 5. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission to special exhibitions is $15 general, $12 for seniors and students with ID, and $8 for visitors 5 through 18. Information: 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org.

A two-day Tooker symposium featuring presentations by eight scholars will be held at the academy March 20 and 21. To register, call 215-972-0522. Prices are $50 for museum members, $60 for nonmembers and $30 for students with ID.

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