George Tooker valuation
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.
What a work by George Tooker is worth
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 is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
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.
Fourteen Americans, PaJaMa and Hartland
Tooker's first exhibition was Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946. From 1944 to 1949 he was Paul Cadmus's partner and part of the PaJaMa circle of Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French, and appears in many of their photographs. With his later partner, the painter William Christopher, he built a house at Hartland, Vermont, and moved there in 1960.
Beside the public pictures, among them The Waiting Room, Lunch of 1964 and Teller of 1967, he painted religious works, including The Seven Sacraments for his church in Windsor, Vermont. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco gave him a retrospective in 1974, and DC Moore Gallery in New York published catalogues of his work in 1998, 2000 and 2012.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
