Albert Tucker was born in Melbourne, on 29 December 1914. His grandfather and namesake was Albert Lee Tucker, MLA, three times mayor of Fitzroy. When he died, Albert’s father John had inherited a stationer’s business, but he had disliked being a small businessman and by the time Albert was born was working on railway maintenance. His wife Clara (née Davis) was more aspirational, but without sufficient income the family found life difficult. Albert left school young, and with his brother worked at subsistence jobs throughout the Great Depression. By 1934 he was working at John Vickery’s commercial art studio in Collins Street and drawing freelance illustrations for women’s magazines. This brought him into contact with Melbourne’s creative artistic community, including the young Sam Atyeo, and the conservative Sir John Longstaff. In 1933 he began attending evening classes at the Victorian Artists Society. Other evenings were spent at the old reading room of the State Library, where he read as widely as he could. He also haunted Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop, and befriended the proprietor. Tucker exhibited for the first time at the Victorian Artists’ Society 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 in favour of freelance illustration and developing his art. 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 record the life in 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.
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.
From the late 1930s onwards, Tucker’s art was increasingly influenced by Surrealism, and 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.
Tucker and Hester married on 1 January 1941, an occasion prompted in part by the announcement that young single men would be conscripted to the Army. By this time John and Sunday Reed were actively supporting Tucker’s career as well as befriending Hester and encouraging her art. They were soon joined by Sidney Nolan, whose ménage à trois with the Reeds was now public knowledge.
In 1942, after Japan entered the war, conscription was extended and 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. His time in hospital meant that he saw shell-shocked soldiers and profoundly injured soldiers newly returned from the front, and memories of them 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 wartime Melbourne. But there is also an underlying fear of sexually powerful women in these works.
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 continued to recur 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 the war and the response of young girls to American soldiers. On 4 February 1945 Joy gave birth to their son Sweeney (although Janine Burke has indicated 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 by John Reed that Joy had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Hodgkins Disease, and had two years to live. In his absence Joy had met the artist Gray Smith, and when she was given the news of her illness the marriage was over. Hester left Sweeney with Tucker who took the child to the Reeds while he considered his future. He was eventually persuaded to allow the Reeds 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. He found post-war London uninspiring, but soon travelled to Paris where he was inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet. In Paris he was also able to be helped by Peter Bellew who was working for UNESCO. While based in Paris, 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 after the War had turned Tucker’s political perspective into one of anti-Communism. His subjects continued to be prostitutes and violence, but the landscape that 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 they took it to the south of France and then Rome.
In November 1953 John Reed withdrew the small stipend he had paid Tucker since 1941, causing him considerable financial difficulty. The news coincided with a visit from Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, who advised him of the open section of the Venice Biennale, and Tucker exhibited there 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, which he 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 – it was the first purchase by a public collection. His next series, exhibited successfully in London, was Explorers, which made craggy despairing images of those explorers who died in the bush.
In early 1960, on hearing that Mary had ended their relationship, he visited New York. Nothing was resolved, but 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 by October and held a successful national touring exhibition.
His Melbourne studio was at 9 Collins Street, the same building as Tom Roberts. In 1961 he met Barbara Bilcock, and they married in 1964. They bought land at Hurstbridge and built a house and studio there. 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.
He renewed contact with Sweeney, now a brilliant but troubled young man who made art as well as turning to 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 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 old friends, some of whom had become 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.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2012
