George Tooker at the National Academy.
Founded in 1825, the National Academy is an honorary association of arts, a school of fine arts, and a museum. The last, located in a block north of the Guggenheim, is housed in one of those impressive mansions looking into Central Park. I paid my first visit today, to see the retrospective of the twentieth century American painter, George Tooker . Painting with egg tempera, he kept alive the tradition of figurative painting when his contemporaries were turning to Abstract Expressionism. His paintings on show can be very broadly divided into two categories: works of social criticism, and figures in landscape or in some other framing device. The former made him famous when his claustrophobic painting "Subway"(1950) was exhibited at the Whitney and bought by that same museum. In that painting, commuters, looking lost and furtive, wandered round the corridors and stairs of a subway station. In "Government Bureaucracy" (1956), official eyes surveyed citizens through ho...