George Tooker is notable for his artistic consistency, returning to themes over the course of decades. Biographer Thomas Garver described Tooker as a “gardener who carefully prunes his vines… constantly refin[ing] his imagery” (Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker, San Francisco, 1992, p. 10). His 1985 survey exhibition at Marisa del Re Gallery inspired Tooker to revisit previous motifs and paint Landscape with Figures II. Across his body of work, figures embrace, rest in weary rows, or sit with their heads against walls. Through repetition, these gestures take on symbolic power, becoming hyperreal. As Tooker himself stated, “I am after reality – painting impressed on the mind so hard that it recurs as a dream” (George Tooker as quoted in Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 1957).
Though Tooker eschewed such labels during his lifetime, he is often categorized as a Surrealist or Magical Realist because of his work’s dreamlike imagery. His interest in physicality and spatial geometry recalls Ivan Albright and Edward Hopper, though Tooker is stylistically closest to early collaborators Paul Cadmus and Jared French. Cadmus and Tooker shared a penchant for repetition and social satire (fig. 1). French was perhaps Tooker’s strongest influence, using “figures outside of a specific time or place, abstracted into a type that resembled the kouros form of pre-classic Greek sculpture, to transmit images of emotional or mental states. Tooker admired French’s ability to shape emotional intensity without having to define specific characters within a painting” (Garver, George Tooker, 1992, p. 12).
The trio met loosely through the Art Students League of New York, where Cadmus first prompted Tooker to use egg tempera. The slow, steady pace of the medium suited Tooker, as did its association with Renaissance art. Throughout his career, Tooker drew heavily on various moments in art history, studying Christian iconography at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Right: Fig. 3. Giovanni Cesare Testa, After Domenichino, Last Communion of St. Jerome, etching, 22 by 14 ½ in, image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Muriel and Philip Berman Gift
In fact, the artist’s conversion to Catholicism inspired Landscape with Figures II, which references images of St. Jerome by Baroque painters Francisco de Zurbarán (fig. 2) and Domenichino. Compare the ochre, vermillion, and blue-black tones of Saint Jerome with Saint Paula with the palette of Landscape with Figures II, noting their similar draping of red cloth. Tooker’s figures are gaunt but muscled, delicately balancing the fragility of age with a sense of inner strength; the leftmost appears to be modeled directly after Domenichino’s St. Jerome (fig. 3). Their expressions are enigmatic, reflecting a groggy surprise as they turn to the light, resurrected from the eternal stillness that characterizes much of Tooker’s work. Landscape with Figures II is a retrospective in a single painting, at once vulnerable, surreal, and immensely hopeful.