![]() ![]() Marsh, in turn, had trained at the League with Kenneth Hayes Miller (1876–1952), an influential teacher, who, as the tide of abstraction swept through twentieth-century art, resolutely looked back to Renaissance models as his inspiration for painting contemporary subjects. These were the years of George Tooker’s adulthood.įrom 1943 to 1945, with his parents’ support, Tooker enrolled at the Art Students League in New York to study with Yale-educated Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), a figurative painter whose preferred medium was egg tempera. In Vermont, where Tooker lived after 1960, that milestone was achieved in 1977. It was not until between 19 that the last vestige of these laws was invalidated by the State courts. It is worth remembering that New York City “liberalized” its anti-sodomy laws in 1950, reducing the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. This included, importantly, living his life as a gay male. Tooker was never a deliberate rebel he accommodated when he could, but in the end, and for all the rest of his life, he found quiet ways to resist, to be the person he needed to be. Enlisting in the Marine Corps, he was sent to Quantico, Virginia, to Officer Training School, but lasted only a few months before being discharged for a stress-induced flare up of ulcerative colitis. In 1942, George Tooker graduated from Harvard College with a major in English. Tooker graduated from Phillips Academy in 1938, and although he already knew he wanted to be an artist, he followed his parents’ wishes and enrolled at Harvard. 62), his parents responded by enrolling him for his final two years at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. When the principal of the local high school advised George’s parents that the school “wasn’t equipped to send students to college” (p. ![]() Soon after the Tooker family arrived, George began taking lessons from Malcolm Fraser (1868–1949, a nearby artist who became a family friend. The combination of affordability, culture, and a train connection to New York City made Bellport attractive. The Glackenses were happy to join a small but congenial summer colony of artist and writers in the neighborhood. Glackens found the shoreline, dotted with scenic bathing beaches, a ready subject for his art. In 1911, William Glackens and his family began renting a summer cottage there, returning every year through 1916. By the turn of the century, it had become more middle class, with one of the old hotels purchased by the Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society of New York. Bellport, 67 miles west of New York City on the Great South Bay facing Fire Island, developed in the mid-nineteenth century as a luxury resort. The Tookers were church-going Episcopalians when George was growing up. Tooker was proud of his Spanish heritage. Although Catholic when they arrived in 1867, they found the overwhelmingly Irish New York Catholic Church unwelcoming to Latins. Well-to-do in Spain, they had moved to Cuba for political reasons, and then later to America, again driven out by political upheaval. His mother’s family had a more exotic story. His father, with French and English family roots, was a bond salesman. (1887–1951), the family, including younger sister Mary, moved to Bellport, Long Island, when George was six years old. George Tooker’ was born in Brooklyn to Angela Montejo Roura (1892–1960) and George Clair Tooker Sr. ![]()
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