This focused installation celebrates the recent acquisition of George Tooker’s Market, 1949, a magnanimous gift of John P. Axelrod (PA 1964). This early masterwork by one of the 20th century’s most singular painters joins the Addison’s distinguished and expansive collection of the artist’s work. Tooker, a 1938 graduate of Phillips Academy, generously gifted his archive of over 200 preparatory drawings to the Addison in 1996 for use as a study collection. While Tooker, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not consider his “messy working drawings” standalone works of art, he was, nevertheless, an incredibly virtuosic and dynamic draughtsman. This presentation provides viewers with insight into Tooker’s working process, laying bare the complexity of Tooker’s precise, geometric compositional schemes, his distinctive sense of color, and his skillful distillation of subject, form, and meaning.
A master of the painstaking and fickle medium of egg tempera, Tooker toiled for months on each of his intimately scaled yet visually arresting paintings, creating only two to three finished works each year. While resistant to easy categorization, Tooker’s works reveal the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the human condition and mankind’s “relation to the world and to himself—and to some spiritual force outside himself.” Frequently, Tooker’s works forcefully critique the impediments to mankind’s yearning for unity and peace, revealing the banal, dehumanizing systems of power (notably government, capitalism, racism, and bigotry) that sow division while critiquing a society that all too often regards injustice and inequality with apathy and disinterest.
In a 1997 appreciation written by Paul Cadmus, Tooker’s mentor, former lover, and lifelong friend, the artist notes that Tooker’s “oeuvre has become more universal, his characters fewer, their garments of no particular style or period, their features timeless, their emotions deep and restrained and their settings everywherenowhere.”
On view on Level 1, Director’s Office (off the rotunda)
