On The Construction And Expression In George Tooker’s Works

George Clair Tooker(1920.8.5-2011.3.27)was a famous American painter of the 20 th century and an exponent of symbolic realism.Love,sadness and ageing are the first three terms that come to mind when viewing Tooker’s work.What is love and sadness?It was a self-alienation tinged with subjectivity and repetition;sadness was shapeless,while love was figurative.Complex,naked and real negative emotions are hidden in the space of the work,as if layers of clues waiting to be peeled away.In his lecture,Miller mentioned "the weight of the layout of the composition in the work,the slightest omission of which is as dangerous as a hole in a kettle." George Tooker’s work is certainly that "kettle",beautifully constructed and complete in material.The staggered and repetitive light,the endless corridors and the stacked,enclosed spaces are Tooker’s most intimate expressions of ’space’,his seemingly realistic,seemingly unrealistic and even surreal spaces,with a series of related creations using the tightly laid out,cleverly conceived cubicle as a starting point.The works of Georges Tooker are a series of works that break the traditional definition of space in painting.Not much research has been done on Georges Tooker,mostly on the realism and critical nature of his work,the disorderly social phenomena and the depressed living conditions of the masses,in contrast to the abstract expressionism prevalent at the time.The emphasis has only been on the discursive spirit,the social phenomena provoked and the humanistic philosophy behind Tooker’s paintings.However,there has been little research on the spatial layout in Tooke’s paintings.The construction of space in a work of art is an important part of what holds the work of art together,and the layout of the picture lays the foundation for the precise expression of the work.The author believes that the choice and treatment of space in Tooker’s works is extremely significant to the expression of his ideas.This paper takes Georges Tooker as the subject of study and uses the matrix of the cubicle as a clue to explore not only the meaning of the term cubicle itself,but also to redefine the cubicle in Tooker’s pictures.It is no longer a narrowly defined office made up of individual workstations,but rather a relatively confined,dense and repetitive space,such as an underground,a locker room,a hospital bed,a waiting room,etc.,which is the reality of Georges Tooker’s paintings.The essay prefers to explore the presentation and emotional expression constructed by the different real spaces,to enter the space of Georges Tooker’s paintings,to unfold to the reader the artist’s elaborate mental world,and to explore the relationship between the cubicle of Georges Tooker’s paintings and their pictorial expression.