George Tooker (1920–2011)

GEORGE TOOKER (American, 1920—2011)
The Red Carpet, 1953
Egg tempera on gessoed panel, 16 x 24 in.
Signed (at lower left) TOOKER

RECORDED: P[arker] T[yler], “Reviews and Previews: George Tooker,” ARTnews 53 (January 1955), p. 56 illus. // Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc, 1985), pp. 51, 53 illus. in color, 133 // Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, George Tooker, exhib. cat. (London: Merrell Publishers, 2008), p. 128 illus. // Dana Gioia, “The Art of George Tooker,” Santa Clara Magazine (Summer 2016), p. 45

EXHIBITED: Edwin Hewitt Gallery, New York, January 10–29, 1955, Paintings by George Tooker // Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveling, 1955–56, The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors, pp. 89 illus., 96 // The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, August 19–September 30, 1966, Reality and Dream: The Art of George Tooker // Hopkins Center Art Gallery, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, on loan // Marisa Del Re Gallery, New York, October 14–December 19, 1992, Tooker’s Women // National Academy Museum, New York, and traveling, 2008–09, George Tooker: A Retrospective // D. C. Moore Gallery, New York, June 9–August 5, 2011, George Tooker Memorial Exhibition: Reality Returns as Dream // Forum Gallery, New York, November 8, 2018–January 5, 2019, Landmarks of 20th Century Art

EX COLL.: the artist; Chandler Ruel Cowles, New York, by 1955; Dr. Nananne Porcher, New York by 1985; private collection, New York, until the present

In 1953, George Tooker and his partner, William Christopher, purchased a dilapidated brownstone at 77 State Street in Brooklyn Heights, embarking on a fraught process of renovation. Through the haze of destruction and construction, Tooker found inspiration for his art directly at hand. In time honored New York fashion, Tooker looked out from his own windows into the windows of his across-the-street neighbors. There, a building-turned-rooming house, like Tooker’s own, sheltered a diverse community of recent immigrants from the unincorporated American island territory of Puerto Rico. This proved the impetus for Tooker’s window series, painted between 1954 and 1968. Tooker did not paint what he saw but, over a period of years, filled his compositions with a mix of real and imagined scenes, inspired by the activities of the building’s residents.

The Red Carpet is set in the basement of the building across the street. Three young women, nearly identical in appearance and dress, sit on a red rug in a space sparsely furnished with what appears to be two beds, ready to be made with folded sheets resting atop their mattresses. Tooker’s picture owes more to the legacy of his undergraduate days as a Harvard College English major than to the realities of downtown Brooklyn. In Thomas Garver’s 1985 book on Tooker, based on in-depth interviews with the artist, Garver explained the meaning of The Red Carpet and its significance in the oeuvre that Tooker was just beginning to create.

Red Carpet (1953) is a picture based on a glimpse into a basement room in a Puerto Rican apartment house in the neighborhood. From that glimpse, Tooker reinvented the scene, investing in the simple room and its occupants a complex visual iconography influenced, in turn, by his reading of Robert Graves’s interpretation of the theme of the White Goddess. This creature, a synthesis from a number of mythological and religious sources, is an extension and embodiment of the three Fates of Greek and Roman mythology those three figures of destiny that rule birth, life, and death.... Three women are seated on the floor, smoking cigarettes. Their faces, devoid of all expression, are unusual even considering the geometric liberties to which Tooker often subjected the human face. They appear to wear finely formed masks that strip away any emotion from their faces. The composition supports the curious states of these three figures. Two of them gaze across the almost empty expanse of room, and their placement at the lower left corner gives emphasis to the closed geometry of the space, pressed forward by the remarkable red rug—a Tooker invention. The color is that of passion, this time a passion of the imagination of the transformation Tooker has wrought upon these figures and the new meaning he has cast upon them. It is perhaps the figure at the left, the one who stares out beyond the picture plane, that most captures our attention. The eyes appear to see the viewer, yet without making eye contact. She appears to be transfixed, utterly lost in thought. She is the seer who has been found in a Brooklyn basement.

This is the first appearance of the Tooker seer, a figure in an altered state, a trance which is neither sleep, nor death, nor consciousness. It is a riveting image, one which will appear in many forms in many pictures and one which always raises the question, what is their state and what do they see? (p. 51).