NEW ACQUISITION
George Tooker’s Girl in the Window Acquired
Will South, chief curator
Painting is a very isolated occupation.
–George Tooker
The Columbia Museum of Art is proud
to announce the acquisition of a major
painting, Girl in the Window, circa 1978,
by the acclaimed 20th-century American
artist, George Tooker. Tooker received the
National Medal of Arts, the highest award
given to artists and arts patrons by the
United States Government, from President
George W. Bush in 2007.
Tooker’s Girl in the Window is in every
respect typical of this artist’s uncanny
knack for the enigmatic, and is in every
respect a modern masterpiece. As the
curator of the National Academy of Design
in New York City, Marshall Price, noted in
the New York Times, “Tooker’s narratives
are so mysterious that viewers have to look
deeply into the paintings. You cannot look
quickly at a Tooker and then turn away.”
When you look deeply into this work, its
meaning lies at the heart of contemporary
art’s most compelling issue: identity.
Aside from the painting’s title, one does
not know if this person in the window is
a woman or a man. The figure is wholly
androgynous. Likewise, the person
represented could be black, white, or
something else. We do not know. Her
stare is nowhere and at nothing. Her face
carries the weariness of the world within
it. This uneasy gaze evoking equally
uneasy emotions strikes at the heart of
contemporary angst.
Contrast this emotional minefield with the
beauty and elegance of the painting itself.
Tooker’s paintings are justly famous for
their control, linear brilliance and glowing
surfaces. This glow is achieved through the
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unique relationship between light and egg
tempera, comprised of colored pigments
mixed with a binder of egg yolk, which is
very fast drying and permanent. Tooker’s
mastery of this unforgiving medium aligns
him with the character and discipline of
the Old Masters, especially those of the
Italian Renaissance.
George Clair Tooker Jr. was born on
August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn and grew up
on Long Island, where he studied painting
with a local artist. To please his parents, he
entered Harvard after attending Phillips
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. At
Harvard he studied English but continued
to draw and do watercolors.
Tooker began studying with Reginald
Marsh at the Art Students League of
New York. There he met the painter
Paul Cadmus, who introduced him to
egg-tempera technique, which enforced
a slower style of painting much more
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