George Tooker, Surveillance, and Cold War Sexual Politics

The Subway, George Tooker's sober painting from 1950, depicts a New York City subway station crowded with travelers filled, a reviewer noted, with "fear, anxiety or despair" (fig. 1).¹ Critics and art historians have consistently read into this and other paintings by Tooker a generic, midcentury urban existential angst, to the extent that The Subway even appears in psychology and sociology texts "as a rendering of the anxieties and soullessness of our cities."² This understanding, attractive because it links Tooker's work to a zeitgeist approach to midcentury American culture, is sometimes coupled with one that seeks to position Tooker, over his own denials, as a magic realist. Membership in this group of artists, whose realistic technique makes fantastic visions plausible, did not guarantee artistic success in the 1940s and 1950s, nor did the group's work always inspire critical insight in reviewers or historians.³ Any artist who devoted skill and training to realist painting during this period, when the hyperheterosexual, hypermasculine abstract expressionists held sway, suffered a lack of critical attention. The same oversight continues today, and in this essay I hope to correct it by rejecting an interpretation loosely based on a general mood. A close historical examination of Tooker's grim depiction of public life in The Subway and other works from these decades reveals in them a heightened surveillance derived, I argue, from a heterosexist capitalist society determined to locate deviance wherever it could. However, the paintings do not simply mark, or even critique, an American society that newly strived to dictate appropriate modes of sexual and political behavior. They also recognize that surveillance is a double-edged sword. While the military, the police, and others sought out deviance to control and punish it, forms of surveillance also existed in gay communities: on the one hand, the gay male was afraid to be "seen"; on the other, he needed to be seen, and to look, to identify potential partners.⁴