George Tooker

(1920-2011)

Sleepers IV 12 1/2 x 24 3/8 in. (31.8 x 61.9 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Frank K. M. Rehn, Inc., New York, consigned from the artist, by March 1980.
Acquired by the present owner from the above, by March 27, 1980.

Exhibited
New York, Marisa del Re Gallery, Inc., George Tooker: Paintings, 1948-1985, February 6-March 2, 1985.
Burlington, Vermont, Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, George Tooker: Working Drawings, September 11-November 1, 1987, pp. 13-14, 32.
Ogunquit, Maine, The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Reality and Dream: The Art of George Tooker, August 19-September 30, 1996.

Literature
T.H. Garver, George Tooker, San Francisco, 1992, p. 148, illustrated.

The copyright to this work is reserved by © Estate of George Tooker, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

George Tooker's Sleepers IV is a remarkable example in the artist's body of work that belongs to one of his most compelling series depicting figures in a divine transcendental state between the realms of sleep and wakefulness. Throughout his artistic career, Tooker mastered the art of portraying mysterious and complex images in the traditional neoclassical Renaissance technique of egg tempera. Tooker's oeuvre is arguably defined by two groups. The first is comprised of images that provide strong social commentary on the isolating qualities of modern life that he observed, whereas the second are of scenes that occur in intimate spaces and seek to explore the inner states of humanity. The present work is an evocative, psychologically probing image that exquisitely represents this second group. Sleepers IV beautifully evokes Tooker's fantastical and spiritual world and masterfully traverses our inner consciousness.

Tooker received his initial artistic training at the Art Students League in New York where he studied from 1943 to 1945 under Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876-1952), and Harry Sternberg (1904-2001). While at the Art Students League, Tooker met fellow painter Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) in 1944 and through Cadmus, met Jared French (1905-1988) and Margaret French (1906-1998). Though he was introduced to egg tempera by Marsh, it was Cadmus and French that Tooker received encouragement from to adopt it as his primary medium. Through them, Tooker was introduced to a wide and energetic network of artists, dancers, performers, composers, and writers, including George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), Monroe Wheeler (1899-1988), and Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996).

Kirstein, renowned writer and art connoisseur, utilized his connections with the budding Museum of Modern Art in New York to have Tooker included in the infamous 1946 exhibition Fourteen Americans curated by Dorothy Canning Miller (1904-2003), an important achievement in Tooker's early artistic career. In 1949, Tooker traveled through Italy and France with Cadmus and the Frenches for six months, studying the works of the old masters and observing the architecture there. The following year, Tooker achieved further artistic recognition by participating in Kirstein's exhibition Symbolic Realism in American Painting, 1940-50 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. It was also in 1950 when the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired his painting of the same year, The Subway, arguably one of Tooker's most significant and recognizable works.

With his position as an artist firmly grounded, Tooker began developing in 1951 a grouping of images of the world of spirit that remain some of his least understood, but most celebrated in his oeuvre. The most numerous of these works are his Sleepers, in which the paintings' figures are often depicted neither asleep nor awake, but rather in spiritually profound, meditative trances. In Sleepers I painted in 1951, the first of the Sleepers, Tooker depicts three young men lying on a beach, resting on trenches of sand that gradually curve around a shore. Two of the men are in a prone position, partially nude and asleep, while the third is clothed in a t-shirt and pants, staring up into the sky above. His eyes appear eyeless, a motif Tooker often repeated in his Sleepers to remove their individuality. This figure entranced by the heavens above beautifully conveys the enriching meditative state of consciousness he experiences and leaves the viewer yearning to share in the experience.

In Sleepers I, Thomas Garver noted astutely that, "The influence of the Italian quattrocento – especially Mantegna—is noticeable in the modeling and features of the foreground figure; Tooker has also indicated Etruscan terra-cotta funerary sculpture as a source." (T.H. Garver, George Tooker, San Francisco, 1992, p. 88) The influence of the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) is evident in Tooker's depiction of the male form in his Sleepers. Tooker's rendering of light and his sculpting of the physical attributes of his male figures is comparable to Mantegna's depiction of Christ in Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (c. 1480, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy), a work Tooker was likely familiar with from his studies and possibly saw during his travels in Italy with Cadmus and French.

Tooker's exploration into portraying this transcendental state resumed in Sleepers II painted in 1959 and continued into the 1960s with Night I (1963) and Sleep (1964) and progressed further in the 1970s with Night II (1972), Dreamers (1975), Sleepers III (1975-76), and finally the present work painted in 1978. With each work after Sleepers I, Tooker gradually refined the ordering of his compositions and reshaped the dramatic tensions felt in his figures. In Sleepers II, painted eight years after the completion of Sleepers I, Tooker intensified the graphic representation of the divine trance. Wrapped in shrouds of white resembling the sands of an endless desert, seven figures are depicted with only their heads visible looking up with fixed, wide-eyed expressions toward the skies above—their unseen souls staring into the heavens. Tooker would revisit this compositional arrangement again in Sleepers III painted in 1975-76.

In Sleep, painted in 1964, Tooker reconfigured his design again and framed the viewer's focus on a solitary figure. Rather than depict him with eyes open toward the heavens, the figure appears with his left arm over his eyes—his unseen soul closed off to the world. Consequently, the viewer's focus is directed toward the physical attributes of the male figure who lies bare chested and covered from the waist down by a classical blue garment. Although the primary ambition of Sleep is to explore the universal meditative state of consciousness experienced by the figure, Tooker's concern for depicting the classical ideal male form is brought to the forefront and the inspiration he derived from the Italina quattrocento is considerable. Tooker employed a similar compositional arrangement in Night I (1963), Night II (1972), and Dreamers (1975) as he revisited his Sleepers.

In Sleepers IV, Tooker beautifully consolidates the compositional and stylistic elements of his Sleepers that he favored. For the present work, Tooker returned to the sand filled landscape of his original design for Sleepers I, however, he eliminated the soft, rolling waters of the shore to balance the composition. Tooker further harmonizes the scene by reducing the figural arrangement to two figures rather than three. He depicts one figure in the background with eyes closed in a prone position and with a shell next to him turned face down in the sand, while another figure near the foreground lays on his back with his head resting on a bundle of garments looking up toward the sky with glossy, transfixed eyes and with a shell next to him turned upward. Comparable to the figure before him in Sleep (1964), the figure in the background of the present work with his eyes closed guards his unseen soul, while the figure in the foreground with eyes wide open reveals his unseen soul to the heavens above. The eyes and expression of the latter figure closely resemble those of his figures in Sleepers II. The influence of the Italian quattrocento and arguably Etruscan pottery design for the modeling of his male figures in the present work is evident. In Sleepers IV, Tooker masterfully combines the visual effects and compositional arrangements of his prior works in the grouping to produce the pinnacle portrayal of the enriching meditative state of consciousness experienced in the world of spirit between the realms of sleep and wakefulness.

Sleepers IV would be the last major painting devoted to his Sleepers and mark the end of his exploration into the meditative state of consciousness depicted within in them. With the death of his partner of twenty-five years, William Christopher in 1973 and his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Tooker instead began to paint images inspired by the traditional spiritual and divine order of his new faith. In Sleepers IV, Tooker produces one of the most piercing images of his spectacular, sacred world and masterfully explores the ever-mysterious transcendence between the worlds of sleep and wakefulness.