Dates:
On view beginning February 18, 2011, ongoing
Location:
Gallery 6, Historic Landmark Building
PAFA will be a home away from home for one of George Tooker’s most startling and fascinating paintings starting in 2011. Highway (1953) is a major work of “social concern” that Tooker made as part of a series of paintings responding to the challenges of living in New York. Like his famous Subway (1950; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Highway critiques modern urban experience through a menacing (and even witty) treatment of subject matter and a carefully choreographed composition that reinforces the anxious, confusing and dangerous aspects of city living. This loan helps the Terra Foundation foster a growing and diverse audience for American art through a collaboration that promises a wide audience for works of art that do not otherwise have a public presence. The Terra Foundation’s collection, among the most extraordinary privately formed collections of American art, is nomadic since it no longer operates a museum building in its home base of Chicago. Several pieces are on long term loan to The Art Institute of Chicago, but this is the first long-term loan placed in Philadelphia.
At PAFA Highway will be seen in a fresh context. Because PAFA plans many gallery rotations each year, Highway’s relationship to other objects will shift gradually over time making its potential meanings expand through new juxtapositions. Highway will broaden the context for existing works in PAFA’s collection by Surrealists and magic realists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Jared French, Kurt Seligman, Honoré Sharrer, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, John Wilde, and Andrew Wyeth. Because Tooker studied with Reginald Marsh and was close friends with other leading New York realists of the 1940s (including Edward Hopper), the juxtaposition of Tooker’s painting with their work in PAFA’s collection will reveal exciting and unexpected correspondences. Initially Highway will be on display in this context, anchoring Gallery 6 of the Historic Landmark Building. Afterwards, thematic installations will be designed to include Highway, such as examinations about the modern city, abstraction vs representation and others suggested by future acquisitions into the collection and tie-ins with PAFA curricula, special exhibitions, and area courses (at local colleges and universities). We are excited about the possibilities this important loan opens up for our installations and programs.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1920, Tooker attended the Art Students League from 1943-45 where he studied with Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Harry Sternberg. After meeting Paul Cadmus (1904-1999), who became a lifelong friend, Tooker adopted the technique of egg tempera, which became his primary medium. A trip to Europe with Cadmus and artist Jared French (1905-1988) in 1949 furthered his interest in Italian Medieval and Renaissance painting. Tooker has been a great admirer of Quattrocento artists such as Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, whose rigorously geometric paintings provided a model for his modern compositions. In the 1940s and 1950s Tooker was closely associated with the photographer George Platt Lynes and curator/writer/dance director Lincoln Kirstein and their circles. He became a major figure in the postwar American art world, acclaimed by critics and peers alike for his social acuity and virtuoso technique. Tooker moved permanently from New York to Hartland, Vermont in 1960 after building a house there with his partner, the artist William Christopher. In 1976 Tooker became a Roman Catholic and has accepted important commissions for the Church of Saint Francis Assisi in Windsor Vermont. He died on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at his home in Hartland, Vermont. PAFA, the National Academy Museum, and Columbus Museum co-organized Tooker’s retrospective in 2008-09. His estate is represented by the DC Moore Gallery in New York.
Read an obituary for George Tooker at
Curator:
Robert Cozzolino, Curator of Modern Art
Sponsors:
The long-term loan of George Tooker's Highway to PAFA is courtesy of The Terra Foundation for American Art.
