BY SEBASTIAN SMEE5/8GLOBE STAFF

HARTLAND, Vt. - George Tooker, the Vermont-based artist enjoying a late and unexpected return to favor, had his first success in the late 1940s just as abstract painting was gaining ascendancy. The art world's center was shifting inexorably from Paris to New York, where artists like de Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko were smearing and splattering paint onto big canvases, exciting a new critical language that made painting sound like an arena of Homeric combat.

Tooker, meanwhile, inspired by medieval and early Renaissance frescoes, was producing modern parables in egg tempera, patiently applying the medium (egg yolk thinned in water and mixed with powdered pigment) with stroke after stroke of his sable brush. Fastidiously planned, laboriously executed, his paintings took months to complete.

As the clamor around abstraction increased, Tooker felt "out of things," he says now.

In many ways his early success belies this. He lived in New York, mixed in giddy creative circles, and was included in prestigious shows like the Museum of Modern Art's "Fourteen Americans." He was right in the thick of it.

Yet "action painting" was not for him. He said in a 1957 interview that he wanted to paint "reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream.

''But I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy," he added.

His most famous painting, "Subway" (1950), which adopts a stretched-out, horizontal format to depict a claustrophobic scene of haggard commuters in a New York train station, has become an icon of postwar alienation. (It might easily have been called "No Exit" or "Nausea" after the play and novel by Jean-Paul Sartre.) Another powerful painting from 1957 was given the purgatorial title "Waiting Room."

He has painted dozens of other contrived but richly suggestive scenes, some of them loaded with menace, others drenched in a warm and almost mystical sensuality, but all painted in a manner combining the placid monumentality of Piero della Francesca with modern detailing, rich color, and a love of geometry.

Now 88 and a recent winner of the National Medal of Arts, Tooker seems perfectly content to feel "out of things." Even as a retrospective of his work moves from the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts in New York to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (where it is up through April 5), he is spending the winter in a cramped little cottage in Vermont, living a life of Franciscan simplicity.

He has been living more or less like this since 1960, when he and his lover, the painter William Christopher, left the whirlwind of New York and built a rudimentary house on a piece of craggy farmland scattered with birch trees near Hartland.

They used to spend the winters in Spain. But when Christopher died there in 1973, Tooker returned to Vermont at the end of the following year, converted to Catholicism, and more or less stayed put.

Today, hard of hearing, he has difficulty moving around and his milky blue eyes seem to lack focus. He no longer paints - he quit that several years ago - and is helped with appointments and other daily practicalities by loyal friends and neighbors. But with slightly pursed lips, he speaks lucidly of the past in soft, clearly enunciated syllables.

Tooker actually toyed with abstract painting in oils in the 1950s. "But Reginald Marsh ((his early teacher)) told me, 'Don't shift to oils - your egg paintings are more distinguished,'" he says.

Tooker believes he spent much of his youth doing what he felt he should do. Raised by his Anglo-French-American father and Spanish-Cuban mother in Brooklyn Heights and Bellport, N.Y., he went to school at the Phillips Academy in Andover. From there, he attended Harvard University ("which I didn't like; I wanted to be going to art school") before enlisting in the Army during the war - another thing he never wanted to do.