Painting: Contemporary Florentine

While the avant-garde captures the limelight by madly mixing media, a hardy band of painters are quite content to set down their vision of reality with meticulous draftsmanship. Such is George Tooker, 46, who works painstakingly in the 14th century Florentine medium of egg tempera on gesso panels. He is unabashedly proud of being called a traditionalist and a craftsman.

All this does not make his themes any the less contemporary. His subjects are haunted faces captured in the city's maze of subways, lunch counters, hospitals — and sometimes square, symbolic boxes that fade away into a phantasmagoric perspective under the baleful glare of fluorescent lights. "I respond to the urban environment," says Tooker, a native of Brooklyn who received his education at Andover ('38) and Harvard ('42), and now lives part of the time in Hanover, N.H. "Painting nature can be a kind of running away and an escape," he explains. "I feel I am urban."

In his current show, at Manhattan's Durlacher Bros. Gallery, Tooker's eight latest paintings show that he is now using less spacious vistas, concentrating on shallow scenes that he calls "bas-reliefs." The themes that concern him are loneliness, racialism, death and youth. Lunch shows people packed closely at a Chock Full O'Nuts-style counter, munching in their respective dream worlds. Landscape with Figures shows haggard young people crouched in a huge honeycomb, and is "my way of protesting the situation kids are in now. I feel sorry for them with the draft, the pressures to conform."

Window VIII and Two Heads have a very special significance. The first was done as a memorial to Malcolm X, shows a shirtless Negro boy, arms raised in a prayerful gesture, staring sadly through the window. The second portrays a beautiful but pale and cold Negro woman with a Negro man peering at her from an orange-colored door. Asked if she were meant to be part white, Tooker replies, "Yes, none of us are pure." His mother's family is descended from 16th century Cuban Creoles.