George Tooker born 5 August 1920George Clair Tooker, Jr. is one of Magic Realism's most prominent visual artists. He was raised by his Anglo/French-American father George Clair Tooker and English/Spanish-Cuban mother Angela Montejo Roura in Brooklyn Heights and Bellport, New York.
Tooker longed to go to art school rather than college, but ultimately abided by his parents wishes and majored in English literature at Harvard University, while still devoting much of his time to painting. In 1942, he graduated from college and then entered the Marine Corps but was discharged due to ill-health.
In 1943 he began studying at the Art Students League of New York. Reginald Marsh - who was his mentor - and Kenneth Hayes Miller were two of his teachers at the ASL. Early in his career Tooker was often compared with other painters such as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and especially his friends, the other Magic Realists, Jared French and Paul Cadmus. All three were championed by Lincoln Kirstein, the influential collector and impresario.Working within the then-revitalised tradition of egg tempera, Tooker addressed affecting issues of modern-day alienation with subtly eerie and often visually literal depictions of social withdrawal and isolation. Subway (1950; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City) [pictured below] and Government Bureau (1956; Metropolitan Museum of Art) [pictured bottom] are two of his best-known paintings.
Although he was raised in a religious (Episcopalian) family he later converted to Catholicism, after the death of his life partner, the artist William Christopher. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and has lived in rural Vermont since the late-1950s, originally moving there with Christopher, where he continues to paint..
