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| Landscape with Figures |
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| Waiting Room |
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| Government Bureau |
" “Government Bureau,” a 1956 painting by George Tooker, was inspired by his maddening encounter with the New York City Building Department.
The painting, in luminous egg tempera, shows people waiting in a vaulted office that seems to stretch to infinity. Clerks stare emptily through glass partitions. No one talks or moves. It’s a waiting room; everybody just waits.
Mr. Tooker, a New Yorker who settled in Vermont, did a lot with angst — his paintings of subways, waiting rooms and office cubicles are similarly haunting — but he also made lovely images of rapture and compassion. He said in 2002 that his pictures had gotten happier as he got older.
The government bureau is now in our heads. It’s the infinite space we inhabit when we languish on hold. The chill light is computer glow. Our isolation may be deeper now than anyone imagined in the ’50s. "
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| Lunch |
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| Voice |
