George Clair Tooker, Jr., American painter (born Aug. 5, 1920, Brooklyn, N.Y. - died March 27, 2011, Hartland, Vt.), created luminous canvasses of social significance that echoed themes of love, death, grief, alienation, aging, isolation and faith.
Tooker’s egg-tempera paintings depicted eerie and haunting situations with mythic overtones. Some of his most chilling offerings include Children and Spastics (1946), sadists bullying three effeminate men; Subway (1950), harried commuters congregating with strangers; The Waiting Room (1957), seemingly catatonic patrons biding their time; and Landscape with Figures (1965-66), the heads of office workers bobbing above a maze of cubicles.