Art Inquiries
Abstract
As a part of its centennial advertising campaign, the Metropolitan Opera in New York commissioned the American figurative painter George Tooker (1920-2011) to create a fine art image inspired after Giuseppe Verdi’s 1859 opera, Un Ballo in Maschera. Within the artist's composition, themes around masquerading, skepticism, and surveillance arise, all of which are common threads within both Tooker’s and Verdi’s work. Primary questions that can be asked from looking at this type of subject matter include: who is truthfully themselves, who may be someone other than they initially say they are, and most importantly, how does the ambiguity of gendered and racial performance challenge traditional understandings of figuration and bodily representation within the visual arts? In exploring these various themes surrounding what can and cannot easily be seen or immediately understood, I will use these guiding central questions to analyze Tooker’s "Un Ballo in Maschera" and Verdi’s opera in better understanding how the multiplicity of gender and racial presentation and performance complicate the ways we interpret bodies both on the stage and within the artist's canvas. By proposing a multiply queer ambiguity that exists within both creative works, I aim to arrive at a more nuanced perspective into how gender, race, and sexuality’s modes of subversion and contestations of power can operate within works of art to offer new ways of perceiving, interpreting, and relating to human performance and figural representation in public spaces and sites intended for cultural consumption.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Del Dago, Alex. "On Stage: Startling Visibility, Operatic Drama, and George Tooker’s Un Ballo in Maschera." 21, 1 (2026). https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/artinquiries_secacart/vol21/iss1/5
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