George Tooker paintings

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George Tooker was a mid-20th Century American artist. He's best known as a magic realist. It was a time of post-war cookie-cutter housing developments, efficiency experts with their clipboards and stopwatches, and, in large corporations at least, of the feeling of being a cog in a machine. Many of his works deal with the alienation of modern life.

He was not a prolific painter because he worked in tempera and mixed all of his own pigments. This is a very old technique that was supplanted by oil paints in the West, and so his works have a hint of antiquity mixed in with his more modern themes. 

George Tooker self-portrait