Albert Tucker (artist)
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Albert Tucker (December 29, 1914- October 23, 1999) was an Australian artist, pivotal in the development of 20th century Australian Expressionist painting. Tucker is known as a member of the so-called "Heide Circle", a group of leading modern artists and writers that centred on the art patrons John Reed and Sunday Reed, whose home, "Heide", located in Bulleen, near Heidelberg (outside Melbourne) was a haven for the group, and is now a museum of modern Australian art.
The son of a railway worker, Tucker was forced to leave school at 15 and take on various jobs to help support his family. He was largely self-taught in painting, before enrolling in art school in 1937 when he achieved public recognition for his “Self Portrait” (1937).
In 1941, he married fellow artist Joy Hester, and they had a son, Sweeney. It emerged many years later that Tucker was not the boy's biological father -- it was probably Australian jazz drummer Billy Hyde, with whom Hester had had a brief affair. When Hester was later diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and moved to London, she gave Sweeney into the care of the Reeds, who adopted him. He joined the Angry Penguins during the 1940s.
Tucker produced a large series entitled Images of modern evil (1943-47) depicting the sordid behaviour of servicemen on leave and prostitutes in Melbourne.
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[edit] Early life
Albert Tucker grew up feeling the harshness and anger in Australia, caused by the depression of the 1930s. He was born in 1914, in a family of three children and a father who was a simple railway worker. It is sufficient to say that Tucker’s early life has very little to do at all with his eventual career as an artist. Tucker did not have access to any artistic materials, coming from a poor family, although he thoroughly enjoyed when his grandfather allowed the children to experiment with his paints.
His real beginnings as an artist began when Tucker left home at 14 to financially aid his family and earn a living for himself. Like thousands of others, Tucker changed from one dismal job to the next, extremely discouraged by the misery and hopelessness around him. As a sensitive and intuitive person, Tucker was compelled to respond and decided to look into art as a hobby. He could not afford art school, so he attended simple life drawing classes three times a week, and in his free time studied reproductions in the Melbourne Public Library. He enjoyed the works of post-impressionists, such as Modigliani, Van Gogh and Cézanne, especially the expressionist works of George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. These expressionist works demonstrated a means of expressing the anger Tucker felt during the depression.
Throughout the 1930s, Tucker continued to hone and refine his skills, whilst experimenting with his homemade paints, unable to afford others. He was ultimately a very self-taught artist, but this leaves him free from artistic conventions that would have been learned in art school.
In the late 1930s, two important social realists arrived in Melbourne – Josl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff. Their images were realistic representations of harsh truths seen in society that characterised the depression. This had a great effect on Tucker’s work, as he too, begins to explore confronting truths of the depression. However, Tucker’s work began to take more shape in the next decade, the “Angry Decade” of the 1940s, as the artists respond the horror of war, incensed by the abolishment of hope, just after the depression appeared to be clearing up.
[edit] Group of artists
From Tucker’s perceptive response to the world around him, he was recognised by two people - Sunday and John Reed. These two saw connections between Tucker’s work and other artists, angry too at the social situation. Sunday and John Reed were members of the Contemporary Arts Society, set up to promote these emerging artists, known as the modernists. The Society was set up in 1938 by George Bell, in opposition to the government Australian Academy of Art, which was believed to promote conservative art and not the modernists.
The modernists included Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Sydney Nolan, John Percival, Arthur Boyd and Noel Counihan. These artists met to discuss material on a regular basis. Tucker enjoyed being part of what he saw as a like-minded group of artists, all focused on producing works along similar themes, in response to war, depression and moral denigration. The artists also brought influences from European movements such as Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Constructivism.
From this “Angry” group of modernists, formed a group known as the “Angry Penguins” which also included many social realists. The modernists and social realists in this group shared the same concerns, and their work became focused on war and its horrors, along with moral decay and the emergence of Americanism. The “Angry Penguins” was also a publication that these artists wrote for, published by Max Harris. Tucker’s original influences, Bergner and Vassilieff, were part of this group. The “Angry Penguins” was the major outlet for the expression of avant-garde ideas.
Albert Tucker also married artist Joy Hester at this time.
[edit] Influences
Tucker’s main inspirations can be divided into periods, although he was originally influenced by the depression, post-impressionists, expressionists and social realists, also keeping in mind his involvement with the Angry Penguins, and his responses to war.
Tucker’s first significant works were produced during his involvement in the army. In 1940, Tucker was called up for army service and spent most of his time working in Heidelberg Military Hospital drawing patients suffering from horrific wounds and mental illnesses as a result of war. He produced three important works at this stage, Man at Table, a pen and ink illustration of a man whose nose had been sliced off by a shell fragment, The Waste Land, an image of death sitting on a stool watching and waiting, and Floating Figures, of two figures floating down a hall, a third with a demented smile. All of these images illustrated the horror and madness of war. At this time, Tucker was influenced by raw images of death and horror, wishing to present a blunt, direct, succinct image of war’s consequences. This is similar to the way social realists wish to present their messages, although Tucker’s actual delivery was surrealistic and expressionistic in appearance.
In 1942, Tucker was discharged from the war and returned to a Melbourne he did not like. He was particularly disgusted, but inspired by scenes of Melbourne’s nightlife, of a city he felt demonstrated a collapse of simple morality. He was shocked and outraged by images of schoolgirls trotting home to reappear wearing skimpy miniskirts made from Union Jacks and American flags, ready for a wild night in St. Kilda with the drunken American and Australian soldiers. In response he painted Victory Girls, an impression of American soldiers, pig-like, grinning and clutching the meager frames of young women in bawdy red lipstick, as if possessions or prizes of war, representing a clear confusion as to what war actually reaps. This painting was the catalyst for his series of works known as the Images of Modern Evil, all depicting similar nightlife and exploitation of women figures, or commodification of sex, symbolized in reoccurring motifs; sticks with red smiles and single, elaborately styled eyes. As Tucker continues creating these images, the subjects become less and less human. His influence is clear, after seeing immoral scenes of sex, abduction, confusion and clear gender stereotyping. He maintains the same surreal, expressionistic delivery with socially realistic content.
The post-war period did not bring peace to his visions, explaining the war’s effects on humanity as “irreparably damaged”, viewing the world with great anxiety and a loss of hope. In early 1947, Tucker traveled to Japan with the Australian army as an art correspondent, required to interpret the devastation he saw there. He produced a monochrome pen drawing called Hiroshima; it contains no figures, just the aftermath of complete devastation, with somber tents and shelters littering the landscape. During this time, Tucker was influenced by his sense of hopelessness after seeing the war, depression, and the fact that society had never improved. Hiroshima does indeed appear hopeless and empty.
Upon returning, he broke up with Joy Hester, who had already had a son, Sweeny, in 1945. Out of bitterness, Tucker left for Europe later in 1947 for the next 13 years. In England and Europe until 1958, Tucker painted many prostitutes, highly influenced by the fact that no city seemed to be free of this “disease” of prostitution, and so painted them in abundance. He then moved to New York in 1958 and his subjects switched from the city to outback Australia, feeling rather homesick. Where some works of Sydney Nolan and Russell Drysdale had reached international level, Tucker rejected them as being nationalistic. He depicted the landscape as being a harsh, barren and sterile wasteland. He distorted stereotypes and icons of the Australian bush, including convicts, Burke and Wills and the Kelly Gang. He was influenced by the sheer barrenness and hopelessness that the outback conveyed, and added these icons as pawns to the outback’s deadly game.
Throughout the 1960s, Tucker began to face many personal traumas. He had begun to form a good relationship with his son, Sweeny, who had been adopted by Sunday and John Reed, but unfortunately he committed suicide in 1979. A few years later, the Reeds both died within a week of each other. He began to feel that many of the people he had influenced in his life were quickly slipping away from him, looking back at Joy Hester, who had also died in 1960. As a tribute, and to immortalise his contemporaries, he produced the Series of Faces I have met. The series saw Tucker move away from his most celebrated themes, and to variations of the Antipodean Head, a representation of an explorer’s conflict with the environment that eventually fuses the two together to become of the same element, as both the landscape and the heads were created using the same medium, texture and colour. His other major subjects were the “intruders” or “fauns” that became mindless metallic beings that patrolled dead environments with guns and weaponry. This added to his recurring themes of hopelessness and loss.
[edit] Attitude, style, subjects
Tucker’s style, subjects and attitude stay the same throughout his life as an artist. His attitude always comes across as perceptive, pessimistic, disgusted and generally critical of the environment around him. Whenever he portrays males or females together, they seem to be sexually confused – the females maintain an extreme prostitute image and the males appear lustful and greedy. He often depicts scenes of madness, destruction and horror especially in response to the war. He portrays many scenes of hopelessness in his post-war stage, of the desert, Hiroshima and of his personal losses.
His style retains a surreal, expressionistic quality. He often places subjects on barren, dream like and hostile plains, with confused or distorted bodies, appearing surrealistic. He enjoys disfiguring his subjects’ forms to emphasise an issue or point, whilst being very expressive in his appliance of mediums, linking to expressionism. His messages however are ultimately of social realist quality, apart from his surreal explorations into his losses in his final artistic stage. He always wants to bluntly and confrontingly display social issues that are harsh, but real and very much a part of society.
'Tucker’s subjects often reoccur. He starts with many psychologically disturbed subjects in his war period, and also wounded subjects. He then moves to a subject of modern evil, with the reoccurring motif of the fake smile, single eye and pole and/or blob-like masses for bodies, with pig-like males. His subjects then move to hopelessness and loss in the post-war period, including the desert, Australian icons, Antipodean Heads, “Fauns” and Hiroshima. The theme linking all of these is often moral confusion. '
[edit] Bibliography
- Albert Tucker: The Endurance of the Human Spirit, Malakoff Fine Art Press, Melb., 2000.
