Albert TUCKER

Australian 1914–99
worked throughout Europe and United States 1947–60

Albert Tucker was a self-taught artist. Articulate and fluent as a writer, Tucker entered forcefully into the debates on realism, abstraction and social content in art argued through the pages of the Angry Penguins journal and the Contemporary Art Society, of which he was a founder. Tucker joined the army, was invalided to a psychiatric hospital and worked as a medical illustrator at Heidelberg Hospital, where shell-shocked and wounded soldiers were treated.

The crescent motif entered Tucker’s art in a portrait in 1939.

[T]he crescent which is in all the Images of Modern Evil didn’t become full-blown until after the army. The pressure-cooked experiences I had probably caused the archetypal things to surface. The crescent is one of the basic archetypal forms. It appeared here through me in Melbourne in a specific context with a specific meaning which connected with the whole war climate and again with all the effects of war on a civilian population. This of course is a black period of Melbourne history that has been swept under the rug and kept out of sight.1

Tucker was discharged from the army in 1942. Image of modern evil, 1945, is an explicit scene from the Melbourne blackout where a soldier, crescent mouth in feverish grimace, grasps a prostitute with his huge skeletal hand. The prostitute falls across the front of the painting, the city rises behind. Tucker said: ‘The crescent became a kind of key which unlocked an energy source’.2

1 J. Mollision & J. Minchin, Albert Tucker: A retrospective (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1990, p. 10.

2 J. Mollison & N. Bonham, Albert Tucker, Macmillan, South Melbourne, & Australian National Gallery, Canberra,1982, p. 37.

Jennifer Phipps

Explorer and parrot, 1960, was painted in London. Tucker left New York at the end of his two-year visa in 1961, with paintings on offer to Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Guggenheim Museum:

I settled in London and started working there. I went to work for a show at the Waddington Gallery in Cork Street. I was there and feeling depressed at the way the show ended with only one fifty guinea sale when I got two letters simultaneously: one from Barr saying the committee [of the Museum of Modern Art, New York] had unanimously agreed to the purchase and then one from Sweeney congratulating me, also saying his committee had agreed to purchase [Guggenheim Museum of Art].1

Tucker’s Antipodean heads were resolved earlier in Rome: ‘What I hoped I succeeded in doing when I finally managed to metamorphose the crescent into the antipodean head was to endow it with a certain kind of fortitude and dignity.’2 Tucker met Nolan in Rome in 1957 and saw Nolan’s outback photos which stimulated themes on Australia. Antipodean heads also had origins in Nolan’s Kelly paintings, first as figures of Pan that ‘began with a rather whimsical impulse to parody the Kelly series of my good friend Sidney Nolan’.3

1 Mollison & Minchin, p. 15.

2 Mollison & Bonham, p. 60.

3 Albert Tucker, quoted in Imperial Institute (exh. cat.), Imperial Institute, London, 1957, n.p.

Jennifer Phipps