Tony TUCKSON

English 1921–73
worked in Australia 1950-73

Tony Tuckson made a phenomenal number of drawings. From thousands of tiny sketchbook and notepad drawings to a select group several metres long, Tuckson drew every day. This is remarkable because he held the time- consuming positions, from 1950 until his early death in 1973, of curatorial assistant at the Art Gallery of New South Wales then was swiftly promoted to deputy director. In order to avoid conflict of interest, he practised his art privately, exhibited once in a group show between 1957 and 1962 and held his first solo show in 1970. His art was first known in its maturity as abstract and boldly gestural, vibrant with his driven urgency to paint, often with ravishing colour, collage and incised, slashing lines. His earlier styles, such as in this painting, are partly related to his teachers at East Sydney Technical College, where he studied from 1946 to 1949, notably under Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson. Balson’s abstract paintings, with their flattened cubist space and clear subtle colours, reveal his painstaking search to paint the eternal space of the artist’s spirituality.

By the time Tuckson drew this gouache, he had made a long investigation of Picasso and the artists of the School of Paris, notably Bernard Buffet, Jean Dubuffet and Amedeo Modigliani, as well as the Swiss artist Paul Klee. Tuckson was an avid reader of art journals and books and encouraged art students to use the latest copies of these in the library of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

One of his favourite subjects was the family, his own family. He married Margaret Bisset in 1943 and their son Michael was born in 1945. Tuckson made many drawings of the three of them, hieratically arranged and looking out from the painting. He also did a series of paintings and drawings based on a cocktail bar, with Margaret and him sitting either side of a barman shaking a cocktail. There is a suggestion here of figures amid the rhythm of regularly spaced but free-form lines and shapes and the syncopation of the jazz that Tuckson liked. At left is the profile of a Picasso-esque head or mask while on the right there is a loose column of blue and red outlines suggesting a female form. The bright colours delineating the figures on a light ground also places them in space and against space, which is the subject of the painting and the heart of Tony Tuckson’s art.

Jennifer Phipps