George Tooker

The Waiting Room* (1959) – egg tempera on wood; 30" wide x 24" tall
Smithsonian Museum of American Art (4th Floor, Luce Foundation Ctr.)
8th and F Streets, N.W.
Washington, DC  202.633.7970
AmericanArtInfo@si.edu

This painting as described by the artist:

“The Waiting Room is a kind of purgatory – people just waiting – waiting to wait. It is not living. It is a matter of waiting – not being one’s self. Not enjoying life, not being happy, waiting, always waiting for something that might be better, which never comes. Why can’t they just enjoy the moment?”

Gay artist George Tooker (1920-2011) grew frustrated with bureaucracy while trying to obtain building permits to renovate a house in New York. In reaction, he painted several works that show “faceless” government workers and worn-down people getting nowhere. The clinical interior of The Waiting Room evokes the conformity of the 1950s and emphasizes the pale, drawn expressions on the figures. The people stand in numbered boxes, evoking ideas of standardization that force people into predefined categories. The sinister man on the left appears to be in charge of the “human sorting,” a mindless agent of bureaucratic scrutiny.

Your blogger lives in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, so I have been able to view this painting numerous times. Although not a large piece, it always catches my eye, and I cannot pass by without stopping to admire its powerful message; it seems the very definition of purgatory.

*The Waiting Room was a 1968 gift from the S.C. Johnson & Son company. In every year since 2003, S.C. Johnson & Son (makers of cleaning products) has received a perfect 100% rating on the Human Rights Campaign's annual Corporate Equality Index report.

George Tooker was one of the America’s preeminent painters. A leading artist in the American Magic Realism movement, he regarded himself as a reporter of society, rather than an interpreter. Born in Brooklyn, NY, his family relocated to Belleport, Long Island. George took art classes from Malcolm Frazier, a Barbizon Style painter. Tooker attended the elite Philips Academy, a private boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. In contrast to the school’s upper class environment, he observed the lower classes during trips to the working class textile towns of Lowell and Lawrence, experiences that would influence his political sensibilities, as well as his art.

Self Portrait (at right):

After graduating from Philips Academy, to please his parents Tooker went to Harvard to study English literature, where he  became active in socialist causes on campus. In 1942, he received his undergraduate degree and entered the Marine Corps, only to be discharged on medical grounds (the psychological stress of bayonet drill had reactivated an old intestinal condition). From 1943 he studied under Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League in New York.

His lover (and fellow artist) Paul Cadmus encouraged Tooker to try the egg tempera medium, an Italian Renaissance technique that is difficult to apply and especially hard to change once on the gesso panels or masonite panels he used. He adopted the technique and made paintings that depict scenes of everyday American life that he transformed into iconic images – haunting scenes reflecting numbing isolation, anonymity, and mindless repetition.

His human figures were often androgynous and of indeterminate race, isolated in their bulky clothes, trapped in their own worlds. He worked at an exceptionally slow pace, generally producing only two or three paintings a year. Fastidiously planned and laboriously executed, each painting took months to complete.

Tooker is often compared to Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Samuel Beckett in terms of his themes and visual style. His works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), the Columbus Museum of Art (OH), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), among others.

In 1968, Tooker (in his studio, above; photo by Tim Lowly 2001) was elected to the National Academy of Design and was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The 2007 National Medal of Arts was awarded to Tooker and presented by President Bush in a White House East Room ceremony.  Mr. Tooker received the award for “his paintings that combine realism and symbolism, transforming scenes of American life into iconic images. His metaphysical works reveal man’s journey from despair to triumph.”  The National Medal of Arts is a presidential initiative managed by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mr. Tooker’s work was included in the “Fourteen Americans” show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, and his paintings also appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and other major museums.

Tooker with Paul Cadmus (right):

His personal life was complicated. Although Tooker was in a relationship with Paul Cadmus, Paul was also the painter Jared French's lover. Not only that, but French was married at the time. When Tooker met the painter William Christopher and began a relationship with him, Cadmus gave it his blessing. With his new partner, William Christopher, they entered into a committed relationship and moved into a loft on West 18th Street in Manhattan, making custom furniture to supplement their art income. Tooker sometimes addressed homosexuality in his paintings, such as the terrifying “Children and Spastics (1946)”, in which a group of leering sadists torment three frail, effeminate men.

By the late 1940s he had developed his mature style and settled on the themes that would engage him for the rest of his life: love, death, sex, grief, aging, alienation and religious faith. After 1960 he worked in isolation in rural Vermont. In 1967 he moved to Malaga, Spain, with William, who died there in 1973. This plunged Tooker into a spiritual crisis that led to his embracing Roman Catholicism. He even produced an altarpiece (1980) for the church of St. Francis of Assisi in Windsor, VT.

Tooker died of natural causes at the age of 90 on March 27, 2011, at his home in Hartland, Vermont, a cramped little cottage in which he lived a life of Franciscan simplicity.

The Fountain (1950):

Window XI (1999):

Window VII (1966)

Gavin Creel

Openly gay actor Gavin Creel is set to play the lead role of Elder Kevin Price in the national tour of the musical The Book of Mormon. The tour will launch in Denver (August 14-September 2, already completely sold out) and will play in 16 other cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Des Moines, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Buffalo and Cleveland.

Gavin (b. April 18, 1976) is an Ohio-born activist, actor, singer and song writer who is also one of the three founders of Broadway Impact, an organization fighting for equality and the LBGT community. He came out publicly in a 2009 interview with Brandon Voss in Advocate magazine. As well, he has three solo vocal albums to his credit – the third, titled Get Out, was released last month on March 20, 2012.

He was recently in a production of the musical Hair on both Broadway (2009) and London’s West End (2010). Creel earned Tony Award nominations for Hair and Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002). He has also appeared on Broadway in La Cage Aux Folles (2004) and in the West End production of Mary Poppins. He’s come a long way since his first stage appearance in which he was a high school sophomore cast as Sir Sagamore in Camelot; the part had a grand total of two speaking words: “And mine.”

Gavin Creel wrote and performed this call to action song,  Noise – an Anthem for Equality:

Photographer Jack Robinson

Jack Robinson, Jr. (1928-1997, photo at left) grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and attended Tulane University before dropping out after five semesters. He began his professional career in photography working for an advertising agency in New Orleans in 1951. Jack's hobby photographs documented night life of the French Quarter and the famed Mardi Gras excesses, as well as the thriving gay subculture in that renegade city. While working in New Orleans, Robinson fell in love with a young man named Gabriel, whom he photographed compulsively. Often nude poses, these photographs were especially sensual, distinguished by their play of light and shadow.

After spending a year with Gabriel in Mexico, the couple moved to New York in 1955, where Jack began a spectacularly successful career in celebrity and fashion photography. He was published in Vanity Fair and Vogue – more than 500 times in Vogue alone (1965-1972). An article in US Camera (1967) featured Jack’s work, publishing reprints of his portraits of Tom Wolfe, Sonny and Cher and Julie Christy. Diana Vreeland , legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue, chose Jack to do her own portrait. He also made particularly sensitive family portraits, as evidenced by the numerous photographs he shot of Gloria Vanderbilt, her husband Wyatt Cooper (a fellow Mississippian), and their sons Carter and Anderson Cooper.

In 1974 Vogue mounted a retrospective titled “50 Years of Women in Vogue”. Newsweek magazine then published a two-page spread that featured just six photographs from this show –  one by Avedon, two by Irving Penn, one by De Hoyningen-Huené, one by Edward Steichen and one by Jack Robinson. This cemented that fact that Jack was among the A-list of major photographers.

Carly Simon in Vogue, 1971

However, demons took over his life, stunting his career. His personal life was akin to so many other tormented eccentric geniuses from the South: Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and numerous musicians, and Robinson turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. His homosexuality caused personal suffering, since he was gay at a time when it was not socially acceptable. Worse, his social circle included major players in drug culture and the club scene, such as Andy Warhol.

As he sank further into drug and alcohol addictions, Robinson’s work dried up. His relationship with Gabriel failed. He had to give up his chic photographic studio address at 11 East 10th Street and had to sell his beloved Steinway. A broken and addicted man, in 1972 Jack retreated to Memphis, where his parents lived. He gave up commercial photography and took up painting, eventually getting back on his feet with the help of AA. He became an assistant to noted artist Dorothy Sturm, designing windows for churches at Laukauff Stained Glass. He lived the last 25 years of his life in Memphis, mostly in seclusion. In 1997 Robinson saw a doctor for treatment for an illness and died of cancer within a month.

"Moses Window" at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital; designed by Jack Robinson for Rainbow Studios.






















At the time of his death Jack had been working as a designer for Rainbow Studios, a stained glass manufacturer owned by Dan Oppenheimer, who was both Jack’s friend and employer. Dan knew that Jack had once worked as a commercial photographer but was unaware of his fame and stature in that field. Robinson left his entire estate to Oppenheimer, including 140,000 photographic negatives. Among them, Dan discovered a stash of celebrity photographic prints, mostly from the 1960s, in a box in a closet inside Robinson’s home. Among them were portraits of Warren Beatty (below), Richard Chamberlain, Joe Dallesandro, Clint Eastwood, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross, Jack Nicholson, Nina Simone, Malcolm McDowell, Carly Simon, Michael Caine, Lily Tomlin, Henry Kissinger, Sonny and Cher, Michael Tilson Thomas, Joni Mitchell, Ralph Lauren, Ike and Tina Turner, Beverly Sills, Andy Warhol, and The Who. These works, never before seen by Oppenheimer, captured the glitterati of that era, in the prime of their youth. Many of these photographs are included in a recently published art book, "Jack Robinson on Show: Portraits 1958-72" (January, 2012).

Oppenheimer remains proprietor of the Jack Robinson estate and is owner of Robinson Gallery and Archive in Memphis.