George Tooker
The Subway
1950
Not on view
Date
1950
Classification
Paintings
Medium
Tempera on composition board
Dimensions
Overall: 18 1/2 × 36 1/2in. (47 × 92.7 cm)
Accession number
50.23
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Juliana Force Purchase Award
Rights and reproductions
© Estate of George Tooker. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, N.Y.
The Subway is the best known of the figurative paintings George Tooker made in response to the social injustices and isolation of postwar urban society—paintings that find an analogue in the period’s existentialist philosophy. In The Subway, Tooker employed multiple vanishing points and sophisticated modeling to create an imagined world that is presented in a familiar urban setting. Whether closed off in tiled niches or walking down the long passageway, each androgynous, anxiety-ridden figure appears psychologically estranged, despite being physically close to others in the station. The central group of commuters is locked in a grid of the metal grating’s cast shadows, while the labyrinthine passages seem to lead nowhere, suspending the city’s inhabitants in a modern purgatory. As Tooker remarked, he chose the subway as the setting for this painting because it represented “a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself.”