George Tooker was an American painter, born in Brooklyn in 1920 and dead in Vermont in 2011, who spent sixty years painting subway stations, government offices and waiting rooms in egg tempera, a slow medium borrowed from the Italian Renaissance. He is remembered above all for The Subway, a 1950 picture of a woman in a red dress lost among strangers in a station that seems to have no way out.
He left fewer than 155 paintings in all, and the best known of them show places most people spend their days trying to leave.
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Tooker did not choose that setting by accident, and he did not choose it because he liked it. He told the Whitney Museum that he picked the subway because it stood for "a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself." Later he said plainly that he disliked the subway and much of city life.
Yet the man who painted the dread also spelled out what it was for. Explaining his work, he said: "I'm trying to say 'this is what we are forced to suffer,' while in other paintings I say, 'this is what we should be.'" The station was only the first half of that sentence.
The second half took him decades to paint. It began in a Vermont village, after the death of the man he lived with, and it ended in a church.
What You'll Discover
Who taught him egg tempera.
What the woman in red senses.
Why he painted the waiting room.
Why he rejected the labels.
Who he left New York with.
What changed after 1973.