GEORGE TOOKER, The Supper

Durlacher Bros., New York
Acquired from the above, 1964

New York, Marisa Del Re Gallery, George Tooker, February-March 1985
Charleston, South Carolina, Spoleto at the Gibbes Gallery, The Paintings of George Tooker, May-June 1987

Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker, San Francisco, California, 1992, pp. 122, 145, illustrated in color p. 123

Thomas H. Garver writes, "In the early 1960's, Tooker...attended a memorial service in Selma, Alabama, for an Episcopal minister and another civil rights worker who had been murdered there.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at that service, and the assembly then marched to the Selma Courthouse to place a wreath in memory of the two men.  It was an intensely moving experience. [Tooker said]: 'Supper is not a depiction of --but an allusion to-- the supper at Emmaus and was painted because I was very moved by Dr. King.'  It is of course, a depiction, too, of the races seated together at a simple, communal supper of bread and wine, that moment of quiet reflection and prayer before the breaking of the bread" (George Tooker, San Francisco, California, 1992, p. 122).