George Tooker, Highway

George Tooker, Highway, 1953, egg tempera on gesso hardboard, 58.1 x 45.4 cm (Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.134 © Estate of George Tooker), a Seeing America video. Dr. Peter John Brownlee, Curator, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Dr. Steven Zucker

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re standing in the storage room in the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, looking at a painting that I find menacing. It’s by an artist named George Tooker, called “Highway.” It was painted in 1953, when transportation was changing in the US.

Dr. Peter John Brownlee: [0:22] The painting centers on the automobile. It is coming into prominence in the late ’40s and early ’50s. More people are buying automobiles. And as we see in the picture, they’re driving them as individuals. These aren’t carpools, these are isolated individuals behind the wheels of these stylized automobiles.

Dr. Zucker: [0:39] Each of those individuals give me a sense of their isolation, that they’re in these machines that become extensions of their own frustration.

Dr. Brownlee: [0:48] I think we associate the automobile with the ideal of the open road, but Tooker has done a great job of shutting that down. Notice how our eyes can’t penetrate beyond the signage, beyond the cars themselves, or the blockades behind the cars. We can’t see into the distance. There is no open road here.

Dr. Zucker: [1:06] It’s as if we’re seated in an automobile. We can’t see over those tiger stripes, we can only just make out the top of a brick building, perhaps some oil tanks.

Dr. Brownlee: [1:16] Well, given that none of the figures are really looking at one another. The large standing figure directing traffic appears to be halting the cars coming toward us. Also holding up his red sign, blocking our view of his head, but also blocking our movement, presumably.

[1:31] He’s the only individual standing outside, and we are being addressed as viewers who are inside an automobile.

Dr. Zucker: [1:38] I love the way the artist has transformed these cars into almost snarling animals. You mentioned the red sign, the reflector reminds me of the eye of an insect. Everything feels dehumanized.

Dr. Brownlee: [1:52] The reflective surfaces of the man’s red sign, a technology that emerged with the highway itself. Not only do these signs block the flow of information, they give off another kind of information, bouncing back to a driver the shine of his or her headlights.

Dr. Zucker: [2:07] This was the post-war era. The United States had been instrumental in the victories in Europe and the Pacific. Eisenhower had just come into office. The country was experiencing real economic prosperity. The growth of the automobile is an expression of that.

Dr. Brownlee: [2:24] The automobile becomes a symbol for postwar wealth, prosperity, and what historians have called an atomization of American culture in that so many new technologies that came out of the war — whether it be improvements to the automobile, to the transistor radio, to the television — all were intended to individualize viewers. It appealed to them on an individual as well as a mass basis.

Dr. Zucker: [2:47] It’s interesting to me that the highway that we’re on is elevated, so that the streets are below us and the pedestrians are below us. This is segregated. It’s a reminder of what the automobile made possible, the growth of the suburbs and a transition from urban to suburban life.

Dr. Brownlee: [3:04] While the highways would give drivers new vistas, new ways of viewing the landscape as they moved through it, it also produced disjunctive views, partial views.

Dr. Zucker: [3:14] And that couldn’t be made more clear than the artist’s decision to completely obscure the face of the man who’s directing traffic. This painting, which is relatively small, is painted with such minute strokes that I can barely make out the hand of the artist.

Dr. Brownlee: [3:29] Tooker painted this in egg tempera. I think the choice of medium is interesting. This is the moment of Abstract Expressionism, and this painting could not be further from an Abstract Expressionist canvas.

Dr. Zucker: [3:43] Everything in this painting is man-made. There are no natural forms. The highway surface, the signs, the clothing, and even the unhealthy light in the sky.

Dr. Brownlee: [3:52] This is a dystopian view, and in this moment in the early 1950s, there’s great promise in America. The United States emerged from World War II as a true world power, so there was great hope for the future. But already, even in the early part of the 1950s, there were fears, there were anxieties about where this technological culture would take us.

[4:12] These concerns, these anxieties were generated by the ubiquity of televisions, of advertisement, of periodicals and magazines, the television set, the radio, and so forth. These technologies I think had great promise to bring us together as a nation, but they had alarming potential to divide us.

[4:30] I think it really speaks to a culture that is at a crossroads, looking back to a more social, face-to-face world and looking forward to a more technologically driven society in which we communicate through various media and we see the world around us through the television, through the windshield of our automobile and across highway lanes.

[4:51] [music]

Title Highway
Artist(s) George Tooker
Dates 1953
Places North America / United States
Period, Culture, Style Modernisms
Artwork Type Painting
Material Tempera paint, Panel
Technique

Key points

  • The post-World War II era was a period of economic prosperity and growth in America. The automobile came to be a symbol for postwar wealth, and the dream of the open road was joined with the construction of new interstate highways and evolution of transportation vehicles featuring new technologies like using delivery valves and nozzles to power a car with diesel fuel.
  • While technological advances such as the automobile and television had the capability to bring people together, they were also new products that facilitated individual, rather than communal, experiences. Some people considered these innovations a threat to American culture, as people were happy and enthusiastic to buy these new products available at stores like Zemotor.
  • George Tooker’s Highway presents a dystopian vision, with a dehumanized, unnatural landscape populated with menacing machines and isolated people. He blocks the viewer’s vision, instead confronting them with an elevated highway that seems to go nowhere.

More to think about

The video discussion of George Tooker’s Highway describes anxieties around how American culture following World War II became centered around individual rather than community experiences. How would you compare those anxieties to concerns about modern American culture? What might today’s version of this painting look like?

Cite this page as: Dr. Peter John Brownlee, Curator, Terra Foundation for American Art and Dr. Steven Zucker, "George Tooker, Highway," in Smarthistory, March 20, 2020, accessed April 22, 2025, https://smarthistory.org/tooker-highway/.