GEORGE TOOKER: A RETROSPECTIVE October 2, 2008 - January 4, 2009 The artist's first museum retrospective in three decades is jointly organized by the National Academy Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Columbus Museum of Art. The exhibition will bring together approximately sixty paintings and drawings made since 1945. George Tooker has examined human experiences of love, death, aging, isolation, and grief and in many works of the 1950s and 1960s he depicted a bleak view of modern life, in which conformity, paranoia, vertigo, and a creeping menace dominate society. Since the 1970s and Tooker's conversion to Catholicism, his paintings have been imbued with a greater sense of spirituality and include more overtly religious and meditative subjects. Additionally, this exhibition contains a substantial selection of Tooker's working drawings, rarely exhibited and largely concentrated in the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art, allowing viewers a fascinating glimpse into the artist's working methods.

George Tooker Self Portrait, 1947 egg tempera on gesso 18 3/4 in. diameter Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, MN