One of my personal faves at the Columbus Museum of Art is George Tooker's Lunch, 1964, egg tempera on gesso panel. Despite the lovely soft tones and overall quietness of the painting, it is striking, and for me, anyway, packs quite a punch. Lunch is an indirect reference to the contentious lunch counter sit-ins occurring across America in the 1960s. Tooker’s figures all bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, silently eating their lunches, completely drained of the actual passions surrounding the issue. Notice the lone African-American pictured in the center. You can feel the warmth in the glow of the lunchroom, and even though there is no connection between the diners, you can sense their collective unity.
George Tooker was born in Brooklyn. After graduating from Harvard in 1942, he joined the Art Students League, where he studied with Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Paul Cadmus. Heavily influenced by Cadmus, Tooker became part of the Magic Realist circle of artists. At age thirty-one, Tooker’s first one-man show was held at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in New York. His shows and exhibitions at major museums and galleries continued through the 1950s and 1960s. From 1955 to 1958, Tooker taught painting at the Art Students League, and in 1974 the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor organized a retrospective of his work. He currently lives in Vermont.
To paint the figure as deliberately
and meditatively as does Tooker, is,
in a sense, to touch, caress, and care for it.
M. Melissa Wolfe
George Tooker: A Biography
