one thing that i found particularly interesting was a few scenes in the first half of the movie. the character played by dicaprio, frank, traveled from connecticut to new york to work. as he was leaving the train one day, with every other business man in a suit and cap, i thought of george tooker's painting the subway, which coincidentally was painted in the decade the movie was set to take place. i took a few screen shots and i will compare these shots to a couple of tooker's paintings. also included is an excerpt from a paper i wrote on this subject two years ago.
Government Bureau, 1956
George Tooker (American, born 1920)
Egg tempera on wood; 19 5/8 x 29 5/8 in. (49.8 x 75.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
George A. Hearn Fund, 1956 (56.79)
George Tooker The Subway 1950. Egg tempera on gesso panel, 18 X 36 in. Whitney Museum of Art, NYC.
The cityscape [of New York] contained “rich, high-keyed raw material.” Within New York were its people, who ranged from “plutocrat to pushcart vendor, jubilant or desperate, triumphantly of the crowd or isolated in it.” The Subway is one of many city views, one in which invites the viewer; as described by an article written on 29 April 1956 in the New York Times; into New York’s underground stations, with its endless tunnels, prison-like walls and cage-like bars that are symbolically transformed by Tooker into a nightmare setting for the individual lost in “the lonely crowd.”
The emphasis placed on “the lonely crowd” by the newspaper relates the painting to sociologist David Riesman’s book The Lonely Crowd, which conveys a negative attitude similar to Tooker’s painting. Published in 1950, the same year dated to the painting, Reisman’s sociology “provided a moody contrast to the cold war’s flag-waving, arguing that the return of material prosperity led not to social peace but inner desolation.” In other words it was a sad attempt to stave off cultural despair. Furthermore, Reisman argued that the deepest problem in American life was a “quiet nihilism and depressed apathy.” Tooker gives form to this apathy in his painting in its figures, which are based on an archetype known as “the anonymous Tooker protagonist.” The Subway is a visual example of Reisman’s sociological rhetoric: “Cultural mores were enforced through people’s sensitivity to the wants and demands of those around them. There were no obvious leaders; everyone was constantly looking at everyone else. He believed that modern Americans were prisoners without bars, frantically glancing from side to side.” Tooker applied this sociological discourse to aesthetics, only taking it one step further. By using the subway as a realistic setting in New York, Tooker trapped this “lonely crowd” behind this caged and contained space, thus imprisoning these archetypal figures, which, according to Reisman, modern society thought incapable of independent action.
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