Suspension in Time: Transatlantic Explorations of “Waiting”
Two paintings with the same title. Both executed in the second half of the 1950s, but on the opposite sides of the Atlantic and within two different ideological systems. They are visually akin—not through overt mimicry, but by a repetition of forms and an atmosphere of claustrophobia. Can a chance juxtaposition of Andrzej Wróblewski’s Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues (Poczekalnia I, Kolejka trwa, 1956) and George Tooker’s Waiting Room (1959) disclose something important or inspiring?
Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues, 1956, oil, canvas; 140 × 200 cm, National Museum, Warsaw ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl
George Tooker, The Waiting Room, 1959, egg tempera on wood, 24 x 30 in. (61.0 x 76.2 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.43
Wróblewski’s painting is one of the most famous works of postwar Polish art and belongs to the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw where I have worked as a curator for thirteen years. With its large scale and bright colors, it makes an impression when hung on the gallery walls. Tooker’s painting, by pure chance, peeked out at me from a book while I was preparing my doctoral defense on American art some time ago. It is more intimate and a much smaller tempera painting dominated by a cold blue color. The circumstances of my approach to both works are therefore asymmetrical, yet I decided to pursue the challenge of thinking about them together, next to each other.
Waiting is a state suspended between the present and an anticipated future. It implies both expectation and uncertainty, since the awaited event may arrive, be delayed, or never occur at all. In everyday life it often appears mundane—standing in line, anticipating a message, awaiting news—but psychologically it intensifies awareness of time, making each moment feel prolonged and charged with possibility. As a concept, waiting can evoke patience and hope, yet it may also produce tension, anxiety, or a sense of powerlessness when the outcome lies beyond one’s control. Although the “action” (or rather the anti-action) of “waiting” implies a moment of pause, reflection, and temporary withdrawal from life and activity—whether compelled or voluntary—and must therefore be considered on psychological and existential registers (waiting as a form of non-life), in the two works in question such withdrawal does not imply the total exemption from social, historical, and ideological reflection. A comparative analysis of the two paintings thus will serve as a kind of psychological and sociological reflection on the Cold War realities of two different, yet unexpectedly also similar, geopolitical locations.
The exploration of synchronous connections across heterogeneous geopolitical realities
Andrzej Wróblewski was born in 1927 in Vilnius (then a Polish city, now the capital of Lithuania). After the post-1945 border changes, he repatriated to Poland and settled in Kraków, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts (1945–1952) and art history at Jagiellonian University. The immediate postwar years, marked by the formation of a new communist state – The People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) – proved a highly turbulent moment for artists engaged in debates over the future of Polish modern art.(See: Janusz Bogucki, Sztuka Polski Ludowej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1983), pp. 8-49; see also the debates concerning the 1st Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków (Pałac Sztuki, December 19, 1948 – January 18, 1949) and Nieborów conference organized by the Ministry of Culture in February 1949: Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1944-1960, Tom 2: rok 1948, Barbara Wojciechowska et al. eds., (Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk, 2012), pp. 241-247 and Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1944-1960, Tom 3: rok 1949, Anna Straszewska ed., (Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk, 2012), pp. 42-47.) Despite the country’s devastation, prewar avant-garde traditions associated with Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Stażewski endured, and abstraction was proposed by some as a viable model for socialist art. Wróblewski, like many of his peers, aligned himself with cultural policy and hoped for a modern socialist patronage system. However, the state soon imposed Soviet-style socialist realism rooted in nineteenth-century naturalism. Despite resistance, this official style became dominant from late 1949 to at least 1953, and cosmopolitan modernism was publicly denounced. A committed communist, Wróblewski attempted to meet expectations for propagandistic, revolutionary art, even though he did not believe in its aesthetic premises. Only with the political Thaw of 1956 could artists again pursue broader formal and conceptual experimentation.
George Tooker was born in 1920 in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of English, French, German, and Spanish-Cuban heritage. He studied English at Harvard University (1938–1942), where encounters with Medieval and Renaissance painting at the Fogg Art Museum — later reinforced by his 1949 trip through European museums — became decisive influences on his art. Childhood visits to Depression-stricken towns fostered in him a strong sense of political responsibility and contributed to his involvement in the Young Communist League during his university years. From 1943 to 1945, he studied at the Art Students League in New York under Urban Realist Reginald Marsh, where he met Paul Cadmus, a pioneer of queer art drawing on Old Master techniques. After the war, Tooker also immersed himself in the work of Mexican socialist realists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros.
As an openly gay man of mixed racial background and a communist, Tooker occupied an outsider position in postwar American society. Although he did not directly experience wartime trauma, the postwar climate deeply shaped his pictorial language. The Cold War infused the nominal peace with a sense of menace: the Red Scare’s fear of the “enemy within,” together with the McCarthy-era persecution of homosexuals, mirrored—albeit in milder form—the mechanisms of control associated with life behind the Iron Curtain.
The relevant analysis of the two paintings cannot be made without outlining the specific background and experiences of the two painters. However, the visual reality of the paintings is equally persuasive in directing one’s intuition to interpret the works in question. What links them, aside from the subject of a waiting room, is the palpable sense of alienation projected by the depicted figures.
Wróblewski’s painting presents a row of figures seated on simple chairs, arranged in a linear sequence that emphasizes stillness and separation. Each individual faces the same direction, yet their bodies remain closed off from one another, creating a visual rhythm of proximity without interaction, their postures subdued and inwardly directed, suggesting a prolonged suspension of action. This enforced stillness transforms waiting into a condition of psychological and social detachment. The stylization of the figures contributes further to the sense of estrangement. Their simplified facial features resist individualized portraiture, rendering them closer to types than to specific identities. This abstraction introduces a degree of anonymity that aligns with broader themes of modern alienation.
Color and atmosphere also play a significant role in constructing the psychological tenor of the scene. The background is composed of diffuse, muted tones that lack spatial depth, producing an environment that feels ambiguous and indeterminate. Rather than situating the figures within a clearly defined architectural setting, the artist creates a flattened field that heightens the sense of dislocation. This visual ambiguity reinforces the perception that the environment functions less as a specific place than as a symbolic space of waiting.
Within this framework, waiting becomes more than a narrative circumstance; it emerges as an existential state. The figures are caught in a moment of temporal inertia, neither engaged in activity nor progressing toward a clear objective. Their silent alignment evokes the bureaucratic or institutional structures of modern life, where individuals are compelled to wait within systems that render them passive and interchangeable. Consequently, the painting articulates alienation not through overt drama but through quiet repetition, anonymity, and the prolonged suspension of action.
Alienation emerges through both the composition and the demeanor of the subjects. Despite sharing the same confined space, the individuals appear isolated within their own private spheres of thought. Their downcast gazes, rigid poses, and lack of eye contact prevent any sense of communal experience. Waiting thus becomes an isolating temporal state: time is shared, but subjectively endured alone. The figures are physically aligned yet emotionally disconnected, reinforcing the impression that waiting has severed the possibility of meaningful interaction. Within this atmosphere, waiting functions not merely as a temporary pause but as a condition that exposes the fragility of human connection in modern life.
Tooker’s composition, by contrast, is constructed on an idealized, Renaissance-derived perspective. The painting presents a structured interior scene composed of a series of narrow changing stalls, arranged in a receding perspective that organizes the pictorial space into a sequence of vertical compartments. Each stall contains an individual figure engaged in the act of dressing or undressing, yet the partitions function not only as architectural elements but also as symbolic barriers. They segment the space into discrete units, visually reinforcing the isolation of each subject. Despite the presence of multiple figures within the same environment, the rigid framework of the stalls fragments the social field, transforming what might otherwise be a shared communal setting into a series of enclosed, private zones.
This architectural segmentation produces a pronounced sense of alienation. The figures’ gestures—adjusting garments, removing clothing, or standing momentarily still—are quiet and introspective, emphasizing inward absorption rather than interaction. Even those seated outside the stalls appear disengaged, their slouched or downward-facing postures suggesting fatigue, resignation, or contemplation. The absence of eye contact and dialogue underscores the condition of solitary waiting that permeates the scene.
The artist reinforces this atmosphere through careful formal control. The vertical lines of the stall partitions create a repetitive structural rhythm across the composition, guiding the viewer’s eye from one compartment to the next. This regularity introduces a sense of order reminiscent of institutional environments—locker rooms, bathhouses, or bureaucratic facilities—where bodies move through prescribed routines. Within this framework, the human figure appears regulated by the spatial system surrounding it. The numbered stalls further intensify this institutional character, subtly implying classification and impersonal organization.
Color and lighting contribute to the subdued psychological register of the work. The palette is dominated by cool blues and muted tones that produce a restrained, almost clinical atmosphere. Occasional accents of warmer hues—such as the bright orange garments—momentarily draw attention to individual figures, yet these flashes of color do not disrupt the overall stillness of the scene. Instead, they highlight the quiet, repetitive actions taking place within each compartment, reinforcing the sense that each individual is engaged in a private moment of pause. The strict architectural divisions prevent any genuine communal experience. As a result, the painting articulates alienation through both spatial organization and bodily posture, presenting modern life as a condition in which individuals occupy the same physical environment while remaining psychologically and socially separated.
In both cases we are confronted by anxiety and ignorance as to the location of the protagonists and the reason of their waiting. Both artists employ figuration and realism, even though their works were produced at a moment when modernist abstraction dominated artistic scenes both in the U.S. and in socialist Poland. In that sense, their attitude rendered them outsiders, and this contributed to the artists’ own sense of alienation within their artistic milieus.
In modern art history, we are trained by a Wölfflinian imperative to see double, to search for oppositions, the imperative famously developed by German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) in Principles of Art History, where he formulated five pairs of opposing formal concepts to juxtapose Renaissance and Baroque painting. He is also credited with the habit of using parallel projectors in the delivery of his lectures, so that the works could be compared. This is also often the case when it comes to the separation of the worlds on both sides of the Iron Curtain.(Although there are more and more publications breaking this pattern e.g.: Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989) (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2015).) This time, however, I would like to point to what is common, using the notion of nonparallel synchronicity of the works in question. I take this idea from the curators of the exhibition 1971 – Parallel Nonsynchronism at the Kiscell Museum-Municipal Gallery, Budapest (2018-19). The show referred to Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times, where the German philosopher pointed out that “Not all people exist in the same Now.” According to Bloch, this is the reason why artists living within the same historical time and society create non-synchronous styles and works of art.(Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László, Enikő Róka, “Introduction. Parallel Nonsychronism,” in: 1971 – Parallel Nonsynchronism, ed. Dóra Hegyi and Eszter Szakács (Bucharest: PUNCH; Berlin: Motto Distribution, 2021), p. 6.) In the case of Wróblewski’s and Tooker’s waiting rooms the opposite idea is more relevant to understand those two artists who lived in different social and historical conditions, but showed surprising synchronicity in their artistic approach. This synchronicity without collective experiences resulted in two formally different works of art, but united in delivering a striking analysis of the 1950s zeitgeist.
Alienation through Waiting
In the book Waiting. A project in Conversation, Shahram Khosravi remarked on the inherent inequality of the action of waiting, stating that a fundamental divide in contemporary society separates those who are compelled to endure prolonged waiting from those who have the authority to impose it.(Shahram Khosravi, “The Weight of Waiting,” in: Waiting – A Project in Conversation, ed. Shahram Khosravi, (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021), p. 14.) Waiting thus constitutes a dialectical relationship in which the dynamics of waiting for someone and making others wait intersect, revealing underlying power relations structured through the control of time. In interactions with bureaucratic institutions, individuals must wait both for their turn and for decisions issued by officials. Such extended waiting operates as a performative strategy that obscures institutional processes while simultaneously reinforcing and displaying power. This experience of inferiority engendered by the act of waiting is inherently alienating: to wait is to be suspended outside one’s own life and everyday practices, placed in a liminal, almost purgatorial sphere. It entails a state of temporal and existential displacement, in which an individual is neither able to proceed with their life nor to relinquish the anticipation, as doing so would mean abandoning any prospect of resolving their affairs. This actual experience of social realities seems, however, to be linked in relation to more existential matters.
In both Waiting Rooms, one senses the atmosphere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and a distinctly Kafkaesque absurdity and futility—yet, paradoxically, also a determined will to wait. Samuel Beckett published his famous tragicomedy play in 1952 in France. It revolves around two main characters Vladimir and Estragon who sit under a leafless tree and wait for a man named Godot, who never arrives. The hopelessness and futility of characters’ waiting was broadly interpreted as an allegory of human existence. Although the Polish premiere of Beckett’s play occurred six months after Wróblewski completed his painting (January 1957, Teatr Współczesny in Warsaw), excerpts of the Polish translation had already appeared in Dialog in spring 1956,(Ewa Brzeska, Recepcja twórczości Samuela Becketta w Polsce (Toruń: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2020), p. 11-12.) while the play toured the United States, including New York, in 1955. The point is not to claim direct influence, but to evoke a shared Cold War cultural and philosophical climate, shaped by existentialism that was circulating across political borders. Both capitalism and socialism generated pervasive forms of waiting, while waiting itself functions as a metaphor for the human existential condition. Yet, as contemporary theorists such as Khosravi note, its social dimension increasingly predominates. Waiting functions as an indicator of lower social and economic standing, which helps explain why Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon appear as tramps rather than corporate executives. Social hierarchies are shaped, maintained, and symbolically enacted through the strategic imposition of waiting.(Harold Schweizer, “Waiting as Resistance: Lingering, Loafing, and Whiling Away,” Sociologia Internationalis no. 12, (Winter 2017): 80.)
Beckett’s play has frequently been read through metaphysical conceptions of time, yet recent criticism emphasizes its probing of existence and human condition within the socio-historical context of the postwar era: the sense of inhabiting an “abandoned present,” devoid of a graspable future, and enduring in the shadow of an unnamed and unassimilable catastrophe.(Laura Salisbury, “Grey Time: Anachronism and Waiting for Beckett,” in: Grey on Grey. At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art, ed. Kamini and Aron Vinegar (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), p. 64.) Tooker’s and Wróblewski’s works similarly register the disillusionment of the first Cold War decade, when early reconstructionist optimism had faded and everyday realities reasserted themselves. Also “alienation” is often used to describe a disconnection from one’s own emotions, needs, and sense of self. At the same time, it is frequently linked to critiques of modern society, where structures such as contemporary work, education systems, and forms of community are seen as producing feelings of detachment and estrangement.(Raymond Williams, Keywords. A vocabulary of culture and society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 36.) Within this framework, the two dimensions of alienation—the existential and the social—become closely intertwined in the works of Tooker and Wróblewski. Despite living and working in “unparalleled” societies, both artists capture the complex psychological landscape of the postwar period. Their works reflect a shared attempt to articulate the tensions, anxieties, and disorientation characteristic of the era. The dialogue between the two paintings thus reveals not only the tangible, everyday experience of waiting, but also the deeper existential crisis shaped by uncertainty, disillusionment, and the erosion of stable expectations.
The Living Dead
Wojciech Plewiński, From the series “Andrzej Wróblewski,” Andrzej Wróblewski’s posthumous exhibition in Pałac Sztuki in Kraków, 1958, © 2025 Wojciech Plewiński
Wróblewski’s painting, first exhibited together with Waiting Room II, (Chairing I) / Poczekalnia II (Ukrzesłowienie I) at the “Po prostu” Salon in the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw in August 1956, was read by contemporary audiences as a reference to the country’s political situation. Waiting was an everyday experience—confrontation with bureaucracy, with basic necessities such as food, waiting for a train that was always late, and so on.(“Visitors’ Book – Excerpts,” in: Avoiding Intermediary States. Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957), eds. Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała, (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Warsaw: Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, 2014), p. 460-463.) The artist used the theme of seated waiting figures in multiple paintings and gouaches from that period, he named the compulsive motif a “chairing.” In Waiting Room II, (Chairing I), and even more in works like Chaired Woman I (Ukrzesłowiona I), 1956, the chair functions as a rigid framework that confines and defines the seated figure. The woman is positioned frontally, her body enclosed within the geometric lines of the chair’s backrest. This framing effect visually “contains” the body, emphasizing the tension between corporeal presence and structural constraint. The simplified forms, flattened space, and limited palette intensify the sense of stillness. The chair does not merely support the figure; it organizes the composition and stabilizes the body within a static, almost confrontational pose. In this sense, the act of sitting becomes a formal device through which the body is immobilized and presented as an object within the pictorial field.
Wojciech Plewiński, From the series “Andrzej Wróblewski,” Andrzej Wróblewski’s posthumous exhibition in Pałac Sztuki in Kraków, 1958, © 2025 Wojciech Plewiński
As art historian Jan Michalski has argued, the painting was read revisionistically; the work and the related cycle Chairings (Ukrzesłowienia) were interpreted in terms of Marxist categories of alienation. For that scholar, however, waiting-endurance is the opposite of revolutionary surge, and this literal reading is reductive. For him, Waiting Room paintings represent “cosmic vitalism” and remains in a metaphysical sphere.(Jan Michalski, “Dwa twierdzenia. Studium porównawcze,” in: Chłopiec na żółtym tle. Teksty o Andrzeju Wróblewskim, ed. Jan Michalski (Kraków: Zderzak Gallery, 2009), pp. 40-42. See also: Barbara Majewska, “O sztuce Andrzeja Wróblewskiego,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 207, 1957: 5: “(People) hopelessly waiting, tormented by the oppression and degeneration of the social system.”) But in the period of the Thaw—when political changes occurred in the Polish People’s Republic, along with the formal abandonment of socialist realism in art—the painting would be read as a critique of political inertia after the initial wave of enthusiasm provoked by the retreat from oppressive Stalinist doctrine. “We are still waiting for change,” the work seemed to say.(Michalski, p. 44.) Nevertheless, it is important to underline that Wróblewski experiences history existentially, and he turned to the theme of waiting precisely at the time when he realized that Polish socialism has failed. As philosopher Boris Buden states:
This is why he also believed in its social and artistic potentiality. And he did believe in it, uncompromisingly. This is why for him a historical failure is always an existential failure, the loss of authenticity as the loss of the very meaning of Being, a form of death, or to use words of the art historian describing the artist’s situation during the Thaw: ‘becoming one of the living dead.'(Boris Buden, “Conditions of Possibility. Translating Wróblewski,” in: Avoiding Intermediary States. Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957), eds. Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała, (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Warsaw: Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation, 2014), p. 726. Buden refers to art historian Joanna Kordjak and her text “Body and Melancholy. The Late Works of Andrzej Wróblewski,” in: Andrzej Wróblewski to the Margin and Back, ed. Magdalena Ziółkowska (Eindhoven: Van Abbe Museum, 2010), p. 107.)
Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room II, (Chairing I); 1956; oil, canvas; 155 × 125 cm; National Museum, Kraków ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl
“Being a living dead” is an extreme form of alienation provoked by “waiting” also present in Tooker’s art, which was equally registered by American critics, when the artist was named by The New York Times as “the painter of modern alienation and despair” at the time of his death in 2011.(Lawrence Downes, “George Tooker,” New York Times, April 6, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/opinion/07thu4.html.) As a committed anti-capitalist and critic of governmental authority, George Tooker depicted the impact of the Depression and Cold War in New York, highlighting how state-imposed bureaucracy tightened its grip on daily life, rendering individuals increasingly desperate and stripped of their individuality. Already in 1950 Tooker’s Subway attempted to show women and men alienated within inhuman capitalist society, and he reiterated that social diagnosis in Government Bureau from 1956. The latter depicts a queue of individuals standing at small service booths arranged in a repetitive, grid-like interior. Each person faces a partitioned counter where clerks, partially obscured behind glass, interact with them through small circular openings. The rigid architectural structure, uniform lighting, and subdued palette create an impersonal, bureaucratic atmosphere. The figures appear silent and isolated, emphasizing themes of waiting, anonymity, and the depersonalizing nature of institutional spaces. It was inspired by his own frustration with endless waiting for building permits and contact with the overwhelming power of bureaucracy.
In 2002 he explained his state of mind while painting the Waiting Room in the late 50s:
I was thinking about people who were waiting instead of living their lives. I was thinking of all sorts of waiting rooms, prison waiting rooms, hospital waiting rooms. And then just of people not living their lives. It was part of my criticism of society, like my Subway was, and several other even later pictures like Corporate Decision [1983].(Justin Spring and George Tooker, “An Interview with George Tooker,” American Art 16, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 77.)
Waiting as not living is precisely the image depicted by Beckett, when waiting devours one’s real existence, leaving someone in a limbo of incertitude and indignity. The depiction of liminal space as a kind of purgatory is used throughout Tooker’s works from the 1950s. They are saturated with an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, underscored by themes of suspicion and surveillance, reflecting Cold War anxieties about Soviet power and nuclear conflict.(Ralph Sessions, “George Tooker. Shades of Parable and Allegory,” in: George Tooker. Reality Recurs as a dream (New York: DC Moore Gallery, 20212), pp. 19-22.) Within this context, art historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. paradoxically interpreted alienation and insecurity as inevitable by-products of the freedoms offered by the West, arguing that, in contrast to the certainty promised by totalitarian systems, a free society can only offer individuals a condition marked by alienation and fallibility.(David Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2000 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 11.)
But, this alienating vision provoked a definitive response – Tooker called his paintings from the 1950s “protest paintings,” therefore the alienation from society drove him not to apathy but defiance. His “protest paintings” were conceived as a critique of precisely these processes of dehumanization and the erosion of spiritual vitality in modern society. Through these works, he sought to awaken a sense of moral and emotional awareness, aiming to inspire reflection, transformation, and constructive action in those who engaged with his imagery.(Sessions, p. 23.)
Waiting Room Mentality
An additional and highly relevant framework to understand the concept of waiting is provided by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his seminal work Provincializing Europe, in which he introduces the notion of the “imaginary waiting room of history” — a metaphorical space to which postcolonial societies have been consigned.(Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 8-10.) While the Cold War divide geographically and ideologically separated Eastern and Central Europe from the trajectory of Western modernity, it may also be argued that this division collectively relegated these societies to a similar condition of temporal suspension — the realm of “the non-West.” The waiting room thus signifies a perpetually deferred modernity: a state condemned to remain perpetually “not yet modern,” or to embody only the appearance, rather than the substance, of modernity.(Amit Chaudhuri, “In the Waiting-Room of History,” London Review of Books 26, no. 12, June 24, 2004, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n12/amit-chaudhuri/in-the-waiting-room-of-history.) It is, in this sense, a purgatorial temporality — an existential condition akin to Waiting for Godot — suspended in anticipation of becoming modern, yet forever unable to attain it fully.
Andrzej Wróblewski, (Chaired Woman I); undated; watercolor, gouache, paper; 42 × 30 cm; National Museum, Warsaw ⓒ Fundacja Andrzeja Wróblewskiego / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl
However, Polish intellectuals consistently viewed themselves as part of Western modern culture, which made the Stalinist imposition of socialist realism especially constraining, as artists were cut off from developments unfolding beyond the Iron Curtain. After the Thaw, many turned enthusiastically toward formalism—informel abstraction in particular—to make up for years of isolation. Andrzej Wróblewski, however, regarded this embrace of Western models with skepticism and instead sought a “third way,” an autonomous position between East and West, which for him was embodied by the values he had long defended – the art that would be “clear, thematic, and for the masses.”(Kordjak, p. 106.) I would argue that for Wróblewski, the pursuit of Western validation risked confining Eastern European artists to “the waiting room of art history,” a position of belatedness and derivativeness. He believed the region possessed its own sources of modernity and aimed to free artistic practice from the gravitational pull of both superpowers. In Waiting Room I, he embraced a renewed form of modern realism that resisted prevailing trends.
Tooker likewise remained indifferent to the rise of abstract expressionism. As Justin Spring put it: “He has had a quietly successful career as a representational painter over a half century that has not been particularly kind to representational painting.”(Spring and Tooker, p. 61.) His protest pieces show acute vision of contemporary reality and deep insight into psychological consequences of social processes. Formally, he was pursuing his own research into realism and Old Masters painting, adding a metaphysical dimension to his small-scale visual meditations. Despite the eerie ambience, Tooker was, just like Wróblewski, concentrated on social commentary: “I am after reality — painting impressed on the mind so hard that it recurs as a dream,” he said, “but I am not after dreams as such, or fantasy.”(George Tooker quoted in: William Grimes, “George Tooker. Painter Capturing Modern Anxieties dies at 90,” New York Times, March 29, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/arts/design/george-tooker-painter-capturing-modern-anxieties-dies-at-90.html.)
In the United States after World War II, politicians, critics, dealers, and museum professionals debated which artistic direction should represent the nation. Milton Brown described this as a struggle between modernist and realist traditions, or between the “pure” and the “social” artist.(Frances K. Pohl, Framing America. A Social History of American Art, Volume 2 c. 1865 – Present (London, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017), pp. 474-475.) The status of modern art became politically contested amid fears of promoting “communist” art, as Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock were viewed with suspicion due to perceived leftist associations. As Frances K. Pohl notes, conservatives condemned modern art—defined as art departing from recognizable representation—as incomprehensible, ugly, and a threat to American cultural values.(Pohl, p. 474.) It is noteworthy that similar debates unfolded in the late 1940s in Poland. Despite many artists opting for abstract art, modern art was likewise condemned by political authorities as incomprehensible to the masses, absurd, and detrimental to the construction of a socialist Polish culture—dismissed as “Western” and ideologically foreign.(See footnote 3.)
However, because the Soviet bloc (and officially the PRL from 1949) insisted on realism, abstract expressionism in the U.S. was subsequently reinterpreted as radically different from socialist realist art and therefore as distinctly American. In contrast to Soviet collectivism, state control, and realist aesthetics, abstraction was associated with the values of individual freedom, free enterprise, and internationalism that defined American democracy. Within this context, advocates argued that only abstract art could genuinely express the spirit of a modern, individualistic America.(Pohl, p. 475.) Therefore, Tooker’s predilection for realism confined him to his own waiting room. The promotion of Abstract Expressionism as the American art put many figurative artists on the sidelines and for years there was noticeably less attention paid to their work.(See: Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940-1960, Greta Berman and Jeffrey Wechsler, eds., (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University, 1981).)
Similarly in Poland, after 1956, abstraction was rehabilitated and incorporated into the official narrative. As Piotr Piotrowski argues in Znaczenia modernizmu (The Meanings of Modernism) post-Thaw modernist practices often involved artists’ withdrawal from political engagement, a development that the communist authorities ultimately found useful. By permitting abstraction and modernism, they could exert control more effectively than during the socialist-realist period, which had ideologically demanded overt social and political engagement.(Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu (Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011), p. 81; Piotr Piotrowski, “The ‘Thaw’” in: The “Thaw.”Polish Art ca. 1956, ed. Piotr Piotrowski (Poznań: Muzeum Narodowe, 1996), exhibition catalog, p. 12.) Wróblewski’s disillusionment with socialist realism was compounded by growing alienation from his fellow artists, many of whom enthusiastically embraced tachist abstraction. Although Polish abstraction was by no means derivative and mimicking Western styles, unwillingly Polish artists entered the “waiting room” of Western modernity. It seems that two different political regimes could synchronously evict realist painters outside mainstream of artistic life.
Waiting in despair… and hope
Tooker’s figures convey an unmistakably existential despair, despite—or perhaps because of—their anonymity, masklike faces, and the ominous atmosphere that surrounds them. The painting evokes an association with the threshold of the modern world encountered by immigrants arriving from “elsewhere,” most notably Ellis Island. I had long imagined that space, even before ever seeing a photograph of it: interminable coatrooms where European émigrés prepared for invasive inspections; extended, sometimes multi-day periods of waiting marked by profound uncertainty; overwhelming fatigue and a sense of inhabiting a kind of purgatory — a liminal zone in which one becomes estranged from life through waiting and reduced to an object within a bureaucratic system.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “The pens at Ellis Island, Registry Room (or Great Hall). These people have passed the first mental inspection.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1902-1913. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/2c815bb0-c6da-012f-49e3-58d385a7bc34
Tooker, of course, did not have immigration specifically in mind, largely because it was not part of his lived experience. Nevertheless, the affective register of Waiting Room resonates strongly with archival photographs of Ellis Island as well as with contemporary artistic representations of displaced people — for instance, Hayfaa Chalabi’s 2021 work depicting exhausted, dehumanised refugees in prolonged suspension. Similarly, a consequence of waiting in Wróblewski’s work is “chairing” (ukrzesłowienie) – the metamorphosis of a human being into an object.(Marko Jenko, “East to West: When the Wait is Over,” in: Andrzej Wróblewski. Waiting Room, eds. Magdalena Ziółkowska and Wojciech Grzybała (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, October 15, 2020 – January 10, 2021), exhibition catalog, p. 229.) The waiting room is a place of ‘chairing,’ it is exactly where the human becomes one with a chair to the point of total disappearance of his/hers humanity. Aesthetically we observe the reification of people also in Tooker’s painting – they seem to be confined to the changing booths like nameless objects.
Across these contexts, a shared mood persists: one of sadness, helplessness, and the profound erosion of personhood within institutional spaces of waiting. Tooker’s predilection for figurative and realist art placed him on the margins of official art history at a time when Abstract Expressionism was being promoted as the national style in the U.S. After the Thaw, Wróblewski remained faithful to realism and socially engaged art—two qualities that were central to his beliefs and that also characterized socialist realist aesthetics. Some observers saw this fidelity as a suspicious clinging to a discredited artistic option and as resistance to participation in so-called progressive Western movements.
By examining these two works “next to each other” we gain a more nuanced and complex perspective on the history of art on both sides of the Atlantic and the Iron Curtain. The comparison does not reflect a simple center–periphery dynamic in which the United States would unambiguously represent the center. In fact, Tooker’s work—previously unknown to me—could easily be considered peripheral, while Wróblewski, although relatively underrecognized in the United States, is widely regarded as the most important Polish artist of the second half of the twentieth century, and is currently experiencing a growing international presence in Europe.(Just to mention a few international exhibitions from the last decade: Andrzej Wróblewski: Recto / Verso. 1948-1949, 1956–1957, February 12 – May 17, 2015, Modern Art Museum in Warsaw; Andrzej Wróblewski. Verso/Reverso, November 17, 2015 – February 28, 2016, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid; Andrzej Wróblewski. Waiting Room, October 15, 2020– January 10, 2021, Moderna Galerija, Lublana; A Difficult Age. Szapocznikow–Wajda–Wróblewski, March 20 – July 18, 2021, MO Muziejus, Vilnius; Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957). In the First Person, June 20 – November 24, 2024, Venice.) This contextual approach reveals that beyond dominant artistic trends, rich political and aesthetic debates exist, and that artists on both sides of all kinds of divides make authentic and courageous creative choices. The theme of waiting rooms serves as a shared metaphor for exclusion, existential impotence, and critical reflection on structures of power, resistance, and inequality in socialist and capitalist systems.
This article is part of the Special Issue “Next to Each Other: Exercises in Horizontal Art History.” Articles published as part of the Special Issue:
