ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: George Tooker
G eorge Tooker, whose timeless artworks are immediatly recognizable, is one of the most enigmatic American painters of the 20th century. He has been considered a symbolic or magic-realist painter. However, he seems to be a figurative painter, but neither a symbolist nor a magic-realist. He also refused to be considered a surrealist artist −“I am after reality painting impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after dreams as such, a fantasy ” − and yet there is something mysterious about the way he depicted modern urban scenes, in what appears to be an otherworldly element juxtaposed with the mundane situations. George Tooker, by George Platt Lynes George Clair Tooker Jr. was born on August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn and grew up in Bellport (Long Island), where he studied painting with a local artist. Later he attended Harvard, where he studied English Literature, after graduating in Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He was a close frie