Wróblewski and Tooker: Transatlantic Waiting Rooms in Cold War Art
In ArtMargins, curator Magdalena Anna Nowak examines the parallels between Andrzej Wróblewski's 'Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues' (1956) and George Tooker's 'Waiting Room' (1959), focusing on the theme of waiting as a common existential experience during the Cold War. Both artworks portray figures caught in a state of limbo, symbolizing feelings of alienation and bureaucratic control. Nowak, affiliated with the National Museum in Warsaw, notes their visual and thematic resemblances despite their contrasting political backgrounds—Wróblewski being a disenchanted Polish communist and Tooker an American gay communist critical of capitalism. The essay also references Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' ultimately revealing the intricate art history and the shared metaphor of waiting as a representation of powerlessness.
Key facts
- Andrzej Wróblewski's 'Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues' (1956) is in the National Museum, Warsaw.
- George Tooker's 'Waiting Room' (1959) is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
- Magdalena Anna Nowak is a curator at the National Museum in Warsaw.
- Wróblewski was born in Vilnius in 1927 and repatriated to Poland after WWII.
- Tooker was born in Brooklyn in 1920 and studied at Harvard and the Art Students League.
- Both artists were committed to figuration and realism during the dominance of abstraction.
- Wróblewski's painting was first exhibited in August 1956 at the 'Po prostu' Salon in Warsaw.
- Tooker called his 1950s works 'protest paintings'.
- The essay references Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' and Dipesh Chakrabarty's 'waiting room of history'.
- Wróblewski's 'chairing' motif is discussed as a metaphor for reification.
Entities
Artists
- Andrzej Wróblewski
- George Tooker
- Magdalena Anna Nowak
- Samuel Beckett
- Dipesh Chakrabarty
- Heinrich Wölfflin
- Ernst Bloch
- Shahram Khosravi
- Jan Michalski
- Boris Buden
- Joanna Kordjak
- Justin Spring
- Paul Cadmus
- Reginald Marsh
- David Alfaro Siqueiros
- Jackson Pollock
- Milton Brown
- Frances K. Pohl
- Piotr Piotrowski
- Hayfaa Chalabi
- Wojciech Plewiński
- Lawrence Downes
- William Grimes
- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
- Harold Schweizer
- Laura Salisbury
- Raymond Williams
- Amit Chaudhuri
- Władysław Strzemiński
- Henryk Stażewski
Institutions
- National Museum, Warsaw
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- ArtMargins
- Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków
- Jagiellonian University
- Art Students League
- Harvard University
- Fogg Art Museum
- Kiscell Museum-Municipal Gallery, Budapest
- Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana
- Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
- Modern Art Museum in Warsaw
- MO Muziejus, Vilnius
- Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation
- Zderzak Gallery
- DC Moore Gallery
- Van Abbe Museum
- Teatr Współczesny in Warsaw
- Jewish Theatre in Warsaw
- Pałac Sztuki in Kraków
- The New York Times
- London Review of Books
- Central European University Press
- Oxford University Press
- Princeton University Press
- Thames & Hudson
- Rutgers University
Locations
- Warsaw
- Poland
- Kraków
- Vilnius
- Lithuania
- Brooklyn
- New York
- United States
- Budapest
- Hungary
- Ljubljana
- Slovenia
- Madrid
- Spain
- Venice
- Italy
- Eindhoven
- Netherlands
- Paris
- France
- Berlin
- Germany
- Bucharest
- Romania
- Toruń
- Poznań
- New Brunswick
- New Jersey
- Ellis Island