George Tooker

E-124: Clarkson Potter. Very Good. 1985. Limited Edition. Hardcover. Hardcover. 4to. Clarkson Potter, New York. 1985. 144 pgs. Illustrated in color. Signed by George Tooker on a plate at the rear with a signed numbered lithograph by George Tooker laid in. #120 of a limited edition of 250. First Edition/First Printing. Slipcased in black cloth with titles present to the front board. Slipcase is lightly rubbed and worn. Bound in black goat leather with matching paper and cloth covered boards. Small tear present to the lithograph in the area around the cheek and the collar (see the last two photos . No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks, binding tight and solid. Once you’ve seen a George Tooker painting, you won’t soon forget it, but Tooker’s life and work are not well known. This gap in American art history is splendidly redressed in this volume of lustrous reproductions and informative biographical and critical essays published in conjunction with the first Tooker retrospective in three decades. Born in 1920, Tooker has long been influenced by his love of literature, passion for Renaissance art, and spirituality. After finding a place within a circle of fellow gay artists and writers, including Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and W. H. Auden, Tooker left New York and the postwar action-painting vortex for Vermont, where he still works in the unforgiving medium of egg tempera, creating empathic, haunting paintings of people literally or figuratively boxed in and isolated, such as his most famous work, Subway (1950) , in which wary women and men navigate prisonlike halls. Sensitive to prejudice and injustice, concerned with alienation and other maladies of the soul, and critical of corporate culture, Tooker describes his freshly germane work as “protest paintings. ” Attuned to life’s mysteries, sorrows, and beauty, Tooker is also a painter of light and love. E-124; 4to 11" - 13" tall; 144 pages .