Independence Day

This year, I’m celebrating Independence Day early. Herewith is my personal Declaration of Independence (minus the crinkly paper, fancy penmanship, and Thomas Jefferson’s inimitable style). Today, after almost twenty years of working in publishing, toiling in cubicles and offices, I’m giving my two weeks of notice and taking the next step forward with my life. I’m going to be a teacher—a high school English teacher, to be specific. For the next year, I’ll be studying towards a Masters in Education that, combined with my MA in English Literature, will allow me to help educate the next generation of leaders. I’ve briefly tried my hand at teaching in the past on the college level, but with the love and support of Annie and Alex, I’m taking the plunge and pursuing a whole new evolutionary stage of self. Teaching and learning are so intertwined that I’m sure that my love of learning will allow me to infect teenagers with the same drive to excel. The texts may be by Melville and Wordsworth, but the subtext will always be learning how to think about the world around us and communicate with the rest of humanity throughout time. Lofty goals, I admit, but after two decades of deadline pressure with little to show for it, I’m ready to tilt at windmills, although I’ll never believe that education’s a lost cause.

When I recently saw a picture of Bob Trotman’s installation sculpture titled Business as Usual (Coverup, Chorus, and Committee) (above), it struck me as the perfect symbol of my life in corporate America. For fifteen years, I belonged to a company that was bought and sold like chattel. We used to laugh at how quickly company letterhead had to be discarded to keep up with the latest name change. In 2001, however, we were finally sold down the river. A foreign company that couldn’t get past Clinton’s Department of Justice’s interpretation of a monopoly found the Bush Administration quite accommodating. The day of corporate judgment when the retained and the redundant were to be separated was scheduled for September 12th, 2001—yes, one day after 9/11. Two corporate suits unfortunately had seats on one of the hijacked planes and died. Out of respect, the company waited two whole weeks before axing 75% of my department. I was retained, but vowed never to forget the looks on the faces of my friends as they were labeled redundancies. In Trotman’s installation, I’m one of the Chorus in the middle, flailing my arms in frustration as such inhumanity is covered over and a committee of corporate types weighs the lives of people against the bottom line with all the compassion of a stone wall.

Two years after that, with an eye on starting a family with Annie, I made the jump from the for-profit world of publishing to the non-profit world, which was strangely making a better profit than the for-profit sector. Better benefits, especially for healthcare, lured me away despite a cut in pay. We were coming out ahead, at least at the beginning. Sadly, the corporate world seemed to follow me, with new corporate suits bringing their inhumane perspective to what was truly a great situation. The better benefits disappeared. Quality of life became a real issue. I started this blog in search of a way of finding a new creative outlet for all the things that I felt were trapped inside me. The job itself had become such a monotonous bore and the workplace a land of the living dead, ala George Tooker’s Landscape With Figures (above, from 1965-1966), that I needed a new escape plan. After much thought, Annie and I realized that teaching was not just an escape from, but also an escape to. I was escaping to the person that I wanted to be.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like my occupation will have real purpose. I’ve never found any real sense of identity in the publishing world. Actually, I’ve felt sorry for some of the people who’ve submerged themselves in their jobs to the exclusion of finding fulfillment in their personal lives. That’s a price I’ve never wanted to pay. The idea of teaching has me bursting with optimism, ala William Blake’s Glad Day (above, from 1796), except, of course, with my clothes on. I’ve always lived the life of the mind as a sideline, a hobby, but as a teacher I will finally be able to bring that part of my life to the front and center. I’m sure this sounds naïve, but I go into teaching clear-eyed. I know there’s drudgery and hierarchies to answer to in the educational world, too, but the final result is something I’m willing to work towards, which is something I just can’t say about publishing. The ethical and moral injustice I’ve witnessed in the field threatens to corrode my soul. Just the promise of teaching even one kid how to think better cleanses my spirit like a warm, summer rain.

I invite everyone to visit my “other” blog, a work in progress about my life as a teacher in progress—Disco Doceo, which roughly translates in Latin to “to learn to teach.” It has nothing to do with The Hustle or the Bee Gees, but will trace my progress learning the steps to the pedagogical dance. Art Blog By Bob will continue as before, but this new venture will surely color and, I hope, improve my writing and thinking about art and life.

[Infinite thanks to Annie and Alex for inspiring me to take this giant leap. I love you.]

The Influence of Anxiety

Edvard Munch’s The Scream (above, from 1893) now belongs to that select club of works of art that reach into mainstream international culture even to people who know little about art. Born December 12, 1863, Munch would be surprised by the appeal of his works today considering how little known he was for most of his life. It wasn’t until 1944 that Munch’s work was shown in America, and only then because of his anti-Nazi stance during the German occupation of his native Norway during World War II. Even his homeland failed to appreciate Munch’s art until Germany and the Expressionists saw a kindred spirit in Munch and exhibited Munch alongside such artists as Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and the other great “discovery” of the Expressionists, Vincent Van Gogh. Today, Munch’s imagery serves as shorthand for the modern condition of alienation and anxiety. The strange, open-mouthed figure on that bridge bathed in bizarre red and orange light screams for us all.

Although Munch could be sociable when he wanted to be, developing deep, if complex friendships with fellow artists such as August Strindberg, the general impression I get from what I’ve read of Munch is that he was for the most part a private, introspective person. Munch’s Night in St. Cloud (above, from 1890) illustrates introspection beautifully, posing a top-hatted gentleman near the window who is barely noticeable in the darkness. The moonlight seeping through the high window casts a shadow on the floor that resembles a cross, perhaps suggesting that the figure is musing on the God’s presence, or lack of, in the world. Instead of a scream of angst, we hear here the silence of anxiety stored up to the point of exploding. Dressed in a top hat and, presumably, other formal wear, the man either anticipates a journey outside or has just returned from his travels and is too preoccupied to undress. In this image of quiet, we can sense the disquiet of the man’s soul.

In the woodcut titled simply Anxiety (above, from 1896), Munch gathers together a group of faces to represent the public sense of anxiety generated by the anxiousness of the individual. Anxiety anticipates the work of someone like George Tooker, who paints the specific brand of alienation and psychic pain found in twentieth century America. Ingmar Bergmann, the Swedish director of many tales of Scandinavian anxiety (Wild Strawberries and Persona are my personal favorites), approximates the atmosphere of a Munch painting in film better than any other filmmaker. In 1930, a burst blood vessel in Munch’s eye damaged his vision severely, cutting back on his ability to see and, thus, paint. Yet, Munch continued to do his best, strangely even thriving in a way on his disability, as if this one added obstacle made the race more interesting as he lived into his seventies. For an artist, nothing could be more angst-inducing than losing your eyesight, but Munch took that misfortune, as he had with all the other misfortunes of his life, and transformed pain into paint. Annie and I almost saw the 2006 MoMA exhibition of Munch work, but Annie, who was very pregnant with Alex at the time, suddenly took sick and we had to cancel. It was a very anxious day. Munch would have loved it.

The Lonely Crowd

When he painted Subway (above) in 1950, George Tooker said, “I was thinking of a large modern city as a kind of limbo. The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.” In Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe’s George Tooker, Tooker’s sense of alienation in modern life is seen from all angles—social, sexual, and religious. A shy, half-Hispanic, homosexual, devout Catholic with a Dorothy Day-esque thirst for social justice, Tooker remains an outsider in American society as much as an outsider in American art thanks to his tempera painting technique. As Cozzolino puts it in his essay, “Between Paradise and Purgatory: George Tooker’s Modern Icons,” “Tooker’s work posits that the absence of community, communication, empathy, or kindness is the source of, and path to, human suffering.” Through his works, Tooker tries to make us recognize that suffering and find a path out of it. Sociologist David Riesman’s 1950 work, The Lonely Crowd, argued that the loneliest individuals often exist surrounded by the masses in modern life. Tooker took that idea and created images that condensed the theory and the emotions surrounding it into a single, powerful vision. Like few other artists, Tooker holds a mirror to modern American life and shows us our true face.

Kafkaesque is the first word that often comes to mind when seeing Tooker’s Government Bureau (above, from 1956). Forced to endure bureaucratically generated waits for permits to renovate his Brooklyn home, Tooker transformed that experience into the menacing image of eyes peeping through tiny openings at the helpless seekers of information. The relentless duplication of pillars and crossbeams generates an ideal geometry of anxiety. “Tooker… employ[s] certain abstracting devices, including a stylized geometry and an elaborate use of pattern, to underscore the Kafkaesque menace of the spaces of officialdom conjured by his protest paintings,” Anna C. Chave writes in “Framing Imagery: At the Intersection of Geometry and the Social.” By presenting the mercilessness of such geometric prisons, Tooker protests against the antiorganicism of modern life stifling the free flow of individuality. Tooker appreciated the power of community thanks to his own experience of benefitting personally and socially from interaction with other artists such as Paul Cadmus and Jared French. Cadmus and French helped Tooker cope with his just-realized sexual orientation and opened up creative outlets through introductions to other artists, such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Cadmus’ brother-in-law, Lincoln Kirstein. “At a time when the young Tooker was struggling to accept his own sexual attraction to men,” writes Jonathan Weinberg in “Tooker and Company: Identity and Community in the Early Work,” “the relative openness with which Cadmus and his glamorous artist friends acknowledged and even celebrated their homosexuality must have been affirming.” Affirmed as a person and an artist, Tooker found the footing to stride forward in his unique style.

Like that other great modern American tempera painter, Andrew Wyeth, Tooker often takes memories and weaves them into his work, such as childhood memories of summer nights in the work In the Summerhouse (above, from 1958). The slowness of the tempera technique allows for the physical experience of reliving memory. “Watching George Tooker paint is excruciating,” writes Thomas H. Garver in “On the Art of George Tooker.” “Stroke, stroke, stroke, it goes on and on, yet to an observer almost nothing seems to be happening. Only the artist knows the glorious silent mantra that creates a work of art.” This communion with the personal past parallels a communion with the whole past of art history. “For Tooker,” Garver continues, “’Art comes from other art’—a phrase he credits to Thomas Aquinas—for no matter what the subject, the new paintings will be refracted by that ‘other art.’” The isolation chamber of the act of painting is simultaneously an echo chamber in which the influence of Quattrocento artists such as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and, perhaps above all others, Piero della Francesca seems immediate despite centuries of distance. Filtering his personal life through the public art of history, Tooker moves away from overtly homosexual content in his early work towards a more universal language of isolation free of any specific alienating cause. As M. Melissa Wolfe writes in “George Tooker: A Biography,” “Other Social Realist painters of the time created works in order to compel change, but, whereas they generated protest at specific economic, class, or political conditions, Tooker’s works protest at the spiritual state that results from existing under such conditions.” It was after seeing the racial segregation and oppression of Selma in the 1960s that he “learned the meaning of the Greek word agape,” Tooker once said, taking that specific protest and making it universal and timeless.

In perhaps the most beautiful essay of the collection, Robert Cozzolino examines the role of religion in Tooker’s work, specifically the Catholicism Tooker converted to in 1976 after the death of his long-time partner William Christopher. In the 1996 self-portrait, Dark Angel (above), Tooker “celebrates belief and vocation through allusions to earlier devotional art and by imagining physical contact between a messenger of good and the mortal artist,” Cozzolino writes. “As a guardian figure, the angel is an anthropomorphic manifestation of resilient faith itself, a spiritual version of the artistic muse, which grants vision and rekindles creative force.” Tooker converts to Catholicism, but he also converts Catholicism itself into a form consistent with his sense of art’s place in society as an agent for creative change. Tooker’s religious works stand out among many other works throughout his career emphasizing the positive rather than diagnosing the negative. “In some of my paintings I am saying that ‘this is what we are forced to suffer in life,’” Tooker says, “while in other paintings I say, ‘this is what we should be.’ I oscillate between the earthly state and a concept of paradise.” A Stations of the Cross Tooker painted consisting solely of hand gestures rather than the full figure of Christ shows the depth of his religious reverence fitted perfectly to his aesthetic sensibility. “What distinguishes Tooker from his contemporaries,” Cozzolino concludes, “is the way he assimilates meaningful religious references into his work without revealing a particular source or committing to programmed iconography.” Tooker refreshes religious iconography while retaining the core meaning of what it is to be a person of faith.


George Tooker’s paintings continue to resonate with contemporary audiences because of the essentialism of his approach. Tooker claimed that he “conceived” Landscape with Figures (above, from 1965-1966) “with the victimization of our youth by the military-industrial complex and its servant advertising” during the Vietnam War era. Yet, Landscape with Figures, with its endless sea of heads trapped within too-familiar office cubicle walls, escapes the specificity of that original conception and achieves the status of icon in the “religion” of modern American existence. Cozzolino, Price, and Wolfe have assembled a marvelous catalogue and exhibition to display the continued relevance of one of America’s truly great modern artists. In his own quiet way, Tooker speaks volumes as to what the American way of life has become and offers a gentle, persuasive statement on a way of American life that can still one day be.


[Many thanks to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a review copy of Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe’s George Tooker.]