George Tooker
Painted The Subway and Government Bureau in egg tempera — American life as a waiting room with no exit.
George Tooker was born in Brooklyn in 1920, read English at Harvard, served briefly in the Marines, and learned egg tempera from Paul Cadmus — a slow, exacting Renaissance technique that suited a painter who produced only a handful of pictures a year. The Subway of 1950 and Government Bureau of 1956 put anonymous, identical figures in tiled corridors and frosted-glass cubicles, and remain among the sharpest images of institutional anxiety in American painting. He was gay at a time when that was dangerous, lived quietly in Vermont for decades, and died in 2011.
The output is genuinely small — egg tempera on gessoed panel is slow, and he worked deliberately — so supply is limited and demand is not, which sets this market. The 1950s pictures lead by a wide margin. Egg tempera on panel is stable when kept properly but the gesso ground is brittle and panels crack, so support condition is the thing to examine. Tooker made few prints, mostly late lithographs, and the drawings and studies for known paintings are sought in their own right.
If you own a work by George Tooker
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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