Albert Tucker

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is painting. Places of work recorded in the authority are Melbourne. Work by Albert Tucker is recorded in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia and National Portrait Gallery.

• Name — Albert Tucker • Birth Name — Albert Lee Tucker • Born — 29 December 1914 • Birthplace — Melbourne, Australia • Died — 23 October 1999 • Place of death — Melbourne, Australia • Field — Painting • Training — self taught • Movement — Expressionism, Heide Circle, Angry Penguins • Patrons — John and Sunday Reed

Tucker left school at 14 to help support his family and had no formal art training, but obtained work as a house painter, cartoonist and commercial illustrator, in an advertising agency before joining the commercial artist John Vickery. For seven years he attended the Victorian Artists' Society evening life drawing class three nights a week.

Tucker associated with John and Sunday Reed, who saw connections between Tucker's work and other artists, angry at the social situation. This so-called "Angry Decade" of the 1940s, saw artists Tucker become associated with the Angry Penguins, a group of modernist artists including Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd and Noel Counihan. The Reeds' property at Heide was a major outlet for the expression of avant-garde ideas. The modernists and social realists shared the same concerns. These artists wrote for the publication Angry Penguins, published by Max Harris. Tucker's original influences, Bergner and Vassilieff, were part of this group.

In early 1947, Tucker traveled to Japan with the Australian army as an art correspondent. He produced a monochrome pen drawing called Hiroshima; it contains no figures, just the aftermath of the atomic bomb blast, with tents and shelters littering the landscape. In 1954 he met Sidney Nolan in Rome, when he produced Apocalyptic Horse and began painting Australia from memory. He was exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1956 and then spent two years in London painting the Thames Series. He then moved to New York in 1958 and his subjects switched from the city to outback Australia. Where some works of Sidney 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. In 1959, Tucker won the Australian Women's Weekly Prize, which enabled him to spend two years in New York producing the Manhattan Series and Antipodean Heads. In 1960 he was awarded the Kurt Geiger Award by Museum of Modern Art Australia which he used to return to Australia and mount his first Australian solo exhibition. He subsequently settled in Victoria and in 1964 he married his second wife Barbara Bilcock. In 1990 the National Gallery of Australia held a retrospective of his work.

• Illustration — Albert Tucker and Joy Hester in 1939 In 1941, Tucker 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 Billy Hyde, an Australian jazz drummer with whom Hester had had a brief affair. His marriage broke down in 1947 and Tucker travelled to Japan and Europe, leading a bohemian life, painting, exhibiting and taking odd jobs. When Hester was later diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, she gave Sweeney into the care of the Reeds, who adopted him. Joy Hester died in 1960, and Sweeney committed suicide in 1979. In his later years in the 1980s, and especially after the deaths of John and Sunday Reed, Tucker took on the task of recording the history of the artists circle he had known:...the thing I became aware of was that there was no human face for that period. So this is where the accidental historian came into play. Because when I thought of John and Sunday, Danila and Joy already gone, then the rest of us of course would follow in rotation. There’s no escaping that simple brute reality of existence, and so I developed this tremendous urge...to try and get what I could done in painting what I knew of them all. The result was the series of portraits known as Faces I Have Met. In each one I was trying to free myself as far as I could of any negative emotion or from the tensions and strains and relationships that had surged all around. One has to free oneself of malice or resentment. So in a sense it was also a spiritual exercise in self-purging and cleansing. The title of this series is another reference to T. S. Eliot, his "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Tucker's work is represented in all of the Australian State galleries as well as the National Gallery of Australia, the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York. Tucker married Barbara Bilcock in 1963. It was the second marriage for both. Tucker died in 1999. Barbara Tucker controls the Tucker estate.