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Dimensions: measurements 23 by 17 in. alternate measurements (58.4 by 43.2 cm)
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Provenance: Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1976
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Literature: Thomas H. Garver, George Tooker, San Francisco, California, 1992, p. 146, illustrated p. 147
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Notes: Painted in 1975.
In 1954, George Tooker moved to Brooklyn Heights, known for its narrow streets lined with bronstone buildings. DUring the sweltering New York summers, residents crowded around stoops and open windows to get the air and watch neighborhood street life. 'Window life' (as biographer Thomas Garver refers to it), inspired twenty finished works between 1954 and 1987. In this series, Tooker used "the window as a 'natural' framing device [to draw] the viewer into a closer involvement - a kind of complicity with the figures in these paintings. Some of them stare straight back at our inquiring gaze; most however, are exposed to our view without any apparent awareness of our visual 'eavesdropping'" (George Tooker, 1992, p. 48). In Sibyl, a young woman cast in shadow stares distantly out her window while an ominous male figures, suggested merely by the brawn of an arm, lurks behind her, obscured by the translucent curtain. A fiery palette of yellows and oranges conveys the intense summer heat. THe minimal rendering of the pictorial space fosters a mysterious dynamic between the two figures. Of a closely related works, Window I (1954), Garver notes that while "there is no physical contact; the figures do not even look at one another, the implications are clear. It is a sexually charged yet chilling image which Tooker emphasizes by the acidulous color of the window shade and the woman's long fingers, intertwined in her dark hair'" (George Tooker, 1992, p. 56).
