estate auction.

[duccio]

This morning I heard a report on NPR that the artist George Tooker had died last week at the age of 90. I became aware of him in 1968 when the magazine AvantGarde had a retrospective about his New York City work. Last month at the auction house, a lithograph was offered from that period of his oeuvre.


11036270.


It fetched a hammer price of $650. They have this little room of graphic art hung salon style that I always am sure to carefully check out. The Tooker was up high on a wall. I noticed it right away and took a look, remembering back to the time I first knew of him. It was across the narrow room from a Whistler etching and two Dürer's which I also paused to view. Those went for much more, although I had doubts about two of them being authentic. (One of the Dürer's surely was.) Influences migrate in from many sources and degrees. They pass through, but taint the thoughts.


Here's an image from 1994 I recently dug out from the tell.

Comments

[shinsetsu]

I like the Tooker there. It's almost surreal looking.

The bottom image is of your love, isn't it? It's nice.

[duccio]

George Tooker produced his paintings in the demanding and precise egg tempera technique. You can recognize the drawing equivalent to that painting technique in this lithograph, with it's precise hatching, and volumetric forms and rendering techniques. Doing symbolic figurative work during the abstract expressionist period, and using these archaic techniques revived from the renaissance made him a real outsider in the NY art world of that period. Still, his work is certainly interesting and well executed.

He was well known in the NY gay community. This lithograph maybe spoke to the repression in those times against gay people, being in the closet and unable to be themselves without persecution and legalized hostility, and living in fear.

It just felt ironic that the only original Tooker work I think I ever saw, suddenly appeared unexpectedly out of nowhere, and I could have taken it off the auction wall and held it in my hands - three weeks before he passed away.
................................

I have a very large archive of pictures of her that I have resisted delving into for a long time. I have to consider the feelings of other people in my life that tend to be jealous or get peculiar if I go back into this material. People who knew her thought she was "bad news". But, things change, and it is feeling like a good time to take a fresh look at all of this old stuff.

She had some schizoid psychological problems which subjected her to frequent episodes of fear and paranoia - the real irrational clinical condition, which affected the way I saw her from behind the camera - and maybe opened a certain dark space in my own psyche which I think I want to examine now, exploring the images I have been posting of her lately.

[shinsetsu]

Ahh, I understand this 'jealous and peculiar' business.

[shinsetsu]

I also meant to say that the explanation for the Tooker above makes sense then. That price was too low, don't you think?

[duccio]

I think the price was about right for these estate auctions, which are usually pretty good places to find bargains. The buyer probably paid about $813. with tax and commission. I'd say that perhaps that was slightly higher than I would have expected for this at the auction house, but then Tooker's output was not extremely large, so the supply is limited. This particular piece was an edition proof numbered #1, so in a sense, it is unique, but on the other hand, not part of the original edition; a "test" one might call it, or an extra-edition piece that would usually be retained by the artist, NFS, and perhaps given to a friend or to the gallery. Now, with the death of the artist, the art market value (probably different than the auction house sale amount) will probably double. So, I would say that the buyer got quite a wonderful deal in terms of their expense.

[duccio]

Reading further about George Tooker, I see he had some connection with the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Maybe at the bottom of the print it says EPI (Experimental Printmaking Institute) rather than EP1 (Edition Proof 1). I think it probably is the former as Proofs are almost never numbered. Only the prints included in the edition are numbered.