Albert Tucker

An Australian avant-garde artist and sculptor, who worked for some time in Europe and America.

Albert was born in the Australian city of Melbourne into the poor family of a railway worker. He had to leave school at the age of 14 to help his family. Not having formal artistic training, he got a job as a cartoonist and commercial illustrator at an advertising agency.

He was a member of “Hyde Krug” – a group of progressive artists and writers, a member of the Society for Contemporary Art of Australia, created in 1938 by J. Bell as an alternative to the Academy of Arts. He became one of the organizers of “Angry Penguins” (“Evil Penguins”), the avant-garde movement of the 1940s and the co-author of the issues of the eponymous magazine.

Tucker often took pictures, using them to create paintings, and also wrote down ideas and scenes that were sketches for his works – he accidentally created eyewitness documents for the history of his time.

The artist was awarded many prestigious awards in Australia and the USA, his paintings are presented in all Australian public galleries, in museums and galleries in New York.

Barbara Tucker, Albert’s wife, kept the artist’s archives and family estate. The Albert and Barbara Tucker Foundation was established, as well as the artist’s museum.

Key Ideas:

– Albert Tucker created his first significant works during his service in the army. He spent most of the time in the military hospital of Heidelberg, becoming an eyewitness of the suffering from wounds and mental illnesses received on the military fronts. His paintings at this stage illustrated the horror and insanity of the war in a style reflecting realities, but presented in an expressionistic manner. Strong images were death (sitting on a stool, it looked indifferently and waited for the time of its arrival), then figures as if floating along the corridor with a mad smile on their faces.

– After the artist’s demobilization and return to Melbourne, the experiences of what he had gone through did not leave him and were the catalyst for a series of works known as “The Images of Modern Evil” or “Night Snapshots”. Before Tucker went to Europe, his attention was focused on urban plots depicting immorality and other vices. The characteristic red crescent appears in the works of Tucker as a symbol of trouble and destruction. The most famous work is “Victory Girls “.

– A grotesque image of two young women who take courtship of drunk soldiers indicates a deep sense of personal disgust, which the artist had for such “secondary” consequences of the war. The ironic name refers to both their morals and the bad taste in clothes.

– Throughout his career, and especially during this period, Tucker used a bold line in his compositions, threw colors together and distorted forms to proclaim his vision of inhumanity and emphasize the extent and depth of his anxiety.

– Abroad, where he spent 13 years, painting began to differ in more general and allegorical character, the author focuses his attention on the texture of the paint layer, which becomes more pasty. Then he returns to the Australian themes – he painted landscapes, animals and farming life from memory.

– Later, in the works of the artist who returned to his homeland, the themes and moods of the merger of a man and his environment dominated. Australian landscapes increasingly provided him with powerful themes, characterized by the determination, as he himself claimed, to show Australians the uniqueness of their own country.

– In the seventies, Tucker made a series of bronze sculptures, and in the eighties – a series of self-portraits and portraits named “Faces that I met”, in which he documented the images of people whom he met.