Description

Extended Data

Birth Place

Melbourne, Vic., Australia

Biography

He was born in Melbourne, on 29 December 1914. His grandfather and namesake Albert Lee Tucker, MLA, was mayor of Fitzroy. By the time Albert was born his father, John Tucker, was working on railway maintenance. His mother Clara (née Davis) was aspirational, but with insufficient income the family found life difficult. Albert left school young and worked at subsistence jobs. By 1934 he was working at John Vickery’s commercial art studio in Collins Street and drawing freelance for women’s magazines. This brought him into contact with Melbourne’s creative artistic community, including the young modernist Sam Atyeo, and the conservative Sir John Longstaff. In 1933 he began attending evening classes at the Victorian Artists Society (VAS). Other evenings were spent at the old reading room of the State Library. He also haunted Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop, and befriended the proprietor. Tucker exhibited for the first time at the VAS in 1933. A self portrait of 1937 attracted the attention of the Herald's art critic, Basil Burdett, and he left his full-time job. The same year he took some classes at the George Bell school but soon left,preferring to direct his own learning. Along with Bell and other discontented artists Tucker became a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938. In 1939 he bought a second hand camera, and it his photographs that so memorably records the life of the Angry Penguins circle in the 1940s.Through his friendship with Harry de Hartog and others he became involved in the Artists’ Branch of the Communist Party. From the late 1930s, Tucker’s art was increasingly influenced by Surrealism. His interest was endorsed by the art he saw in the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, which featured works by Dali, Ernst, de Chirico and Picasso.In 1938 he became romantically involved with Joy Hester, an art student from the National Gallery School who began attending Victorian Artists Society life drawing classes, and in 1939 they moved in together. Tucker and Hester married on 1 January 1941. By this time John and Sunday Reed were financially supporting Tucker’s career as well as befriending Hester and encouraging her art. At Heide they were joined by Sidney Nolan, whose ménage à trois with the Reeds was public knowledge.In 1942, after Japan entered the war Tucker enlisted in the medical corps. His status as an artist led to him making illustrations for the officers at the Wangaratta base and after a bout of pneumonia was medically discharged in October 1943. The sight of shell-shocked and profoundly injured soldiers newly returned from the front continued to haunt him for the rest of his life, and coloured the direction of his art.Tucker began to paint works based on his disgust at the sexual promiscuity of young girls in times of war, a concern that evolved into a savage critique of strong female sexuality. Many of his paintings are dominated by a shape based on a full-lipped woman’s mouth, evolving into an agressive lipstick pink crescent, and this shape recurred for the rest of his painting life. After leaving the Army, Tucker worked for a while with Arthur Boyd at his pottery at Murrumbeena, but then resumed work on bq). Images of Modern Evilbq). , an emotionally searing response to young girls, American soldiers and the War. On 4 February 1945 Joy gave birth to their son Sweeney (although Sunday later claimed that Tucker may not have been the father).In early 1947 Tucker visited Japan, and saw the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, images that would always stay with him. He met with Japanese artists and painted portraits of American officers to raise money to buy cultured pearls for resale in Australia. On his return from Japan he was told that Joy had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, and had two years to live. In his absence Joy had met the artist Gray Smith, and when she was told of her illness the marriage was over. Hester left Sweeney with Tucker who left the baby with the Reeds while he considered his future. He was eventually persuaded to allow them to adopt his son. It was a decision Tucker regretted for the rest of his life. He left Australia for England on 9 September 1947. Post-war London was uninspiring, but in Paris he was inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet. In Paris he was also helped by Peter Bellew who was now working for UNESCO. Tucker visited other European cities, seeing as much art as he could. He was especially impressed with German Expressionism and in 1951 he travelled to Frankfurt-am-Main to join his new companion, Mary Dixon, an American he had met in Paris. The faction fights of the Communist Party in the 1940s and the activities of the Soviet Union had turned Tucker’s political perspective into one of anti-Communism. The landscape that now coloured his perceptions was that of bomb-blasted Germany. The next year they returned to Paris where they lived in a caravan Tucker had built, and later travelled to the south of France and Rome. In November 1953 John Reed withdrew the small stipend he had paid Tucker, causing him considerable financial difficulty. The news coincided with a visit from Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, who advised him of possibilities of the Venice Biennale, where Tucker exhibited in 1956. Nolan also showed Tucker his photographs of animals killed in the Australian drought, imagery that was to provide Tucker with new subject matter.In Rome he befriended the Italian artist Alberto Burri who introduced him to a new adhesive into which he could mix sand and dirt for his Nolan inspired work, completed in London. In 1958 Dixon visited California to see her mother, and took some of Tuckers’ work with her. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Lunar Landscape – the first purchase by a public collection. His next series, exhibited successfully in London, Explorers, made craggy despairing images of those explorers who died in the bush.In early 1960 he visited New York where he had successful exhibitions, was given the free use of a furnished apartment, and work was purchased by the Guggenheim. After a further successful London exhibition, he returned home to Australia and held a successful national touring exhibition. His first Melbourne studio was at 9 Collins Street, the same building as Tom Roberts. In 1961 he met Barbara Bilcock, who he married in 1964. They bought land at Hurstbridge and built a house and studio. He became a passionate conservationist, but fell out with his old friends by supporting the Americans and the Australian governments in their stance on the Vietnam War.In Melbourne he renewed contact with Sweeney, a brilliant but troubled young man who made art as well as running commercial art galleries, subsidised by his adoptive parents. In 1972 Sweeney Reed Gallery showed the entire series of Images of Modern Evil for the first time. It was a major critical success. Sweeney however could not reconcile the contradictions of his life and on 29 March 1979, in the middle of negotiations to sell Tucker’s early paintings to the National Gallery of Australia he committed suicide.Albert Tucker’s last series of paintings, Faces I have met, was a series of recollected portraits of friends and enemies. It was prompted in part by the revival of interest in his earlier work brought about by James Mollison’s advocacy of it, and academic researchers including Richard Haese and Janine Burke. He died of a heart attack at a private hospital where Barbara had taken him for tests. Writers: Kerr, Joan Joanna Mendelssohn Date written: 1996 Last updated: 2012

Born

b. 29 December 1914

Summary

Albert Tucker was one of the Angry Penguins group of artists who were at Heide in the 1940s. His art was shaped in part by the poverty he experienced and saw during the Great Depression and his experiences in the Army and Melbourne in World War II. He also worked to ensure the posthumous reputation of his first wife, Joy Hester.

Gender

Male

Died

23-Oct-99

Age at death

85