painter, graphic artist and art teacher, was born on 22 July 1914 at Cowell, Eyre Peninsula (SA); her grandfather and Marie Tuck 's father were brothers. In 1927, aged 13, Ruth attended Saturday morning adult classes at the School of Arts and Crafts (SASAC), Adelaide. She studied there full-time in 1933-34, attended Teacher’s College in 1935, and studied art part-time in 1939-51. Her teachers at the SASAC were Dorrit Black , Mary P. Harris , Marie Tuck and Ivor Hele. Black became her teacher of landscape painting in 1940 and significantly influenced her work.
Ruth Tuck was among the insurgent members of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA) who successfully pressed to have their innovative work shown with the Society while also having constitutional autonomy; the 'First Exposition’ of the RSASA Associate Contemporary Group opened in July 1942. At the same time, the group formed the SA Branch of the Contemporary Art Society, on 23 June 1942; Tuck was minute secretary. From 1942 she exhibited regularly with both groups. In 1943 her work was included in the Contemporary Art Society of Australia’s important Anti-Fascist Exhibition when it was at the RSASA Gallery, Adelaide.
In 1943 Ruth Tuck married Sydney architect and artist Mervyn Smith, who fundamentally influenced her style. From then on, she concentrated on flower paintings, portraits and landscapes rendered in bright watercolour and embracing expressionistic elements. In 1947 an 'Exhibition of Watercolours by Ruth Tuck and Mervyn Smith’ was held at John Martin’s Art Gallery, Adelaide.
In 1952 Tuck taught art history at Newcastle (NSW) and in 1956 lectured at the Department of Adult Education, Adelaide. In 1955-57 she taught at the SA School of Arts and Crafts and in 1957-59 lectured at the Institute of Technology. She was art critic for the Adelaide Advertiser in 1968-72. She founded the Ruth Tuck Art School for children in 1956; her students have several times been awarded the Indian Nehru Medal and the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Medal. In 1969 she was invited to India by Shankar Pillai, editor of Shankar’s Weekly , to talk about her successful methods of teaching art to children, then visited the UK and Europe. In Germany she studied the work of German Expressionist artists, including Käthe Kollwitz ( see Tina Wentcher ).
Tuck is a prolific draughtsperson. In 1981 Dr Wolfgang Schwarz published 200 of her musician drawings in Ruth Tuck: Musiker-impressionen (Wuppertal, Germany). An important exhibition of them was held at the Kulturzentrum, Ludwigsburg, and the Wurttembergischen Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart in 1984. In 1986 the Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide, gave her a retrospective, Ruth Tuck: Five Decades of Paintings .
Tuck was elected a Fellow of the RSASA in 1950 and is an Honorary Life Member of both the RSASA and the CAS. In 1981 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her services as an art teacher and artist. On 8 July 1994, at Flinders University, the Chancellor’s Medal to commemorate the Centenary of Women’s Suffrage in South Australia was conferred on her as 'a teacher and a watercolour painter at the forefront of the fight for the acceptance in Australia of modernism in art’.
In 1998 Tuck was awarded a Doctor of the University of South Australia.
- Writers:
- Snowden, Betty
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
