ALBERT TUCKER Australian, 1914-1999

The artist

Adrian Slinger Gallery, Brisbane

Private collection, Norfolk Island

Like his contemporary Sidney Nolan, Tucker was fascinated by the themes of  European incursion and confrontation in the Australian landscape. However, although he was a member of the now celebrated ‘Heide’ circle in Melbourne in the 1940s, Tucker was at the same time a fiercely independent artist. After the end of his marriage to Joy Hester, he travelled overseas. During the 1950s, working in Rome and New York, he absorbed some of the more avant-garde aspects of international contemporary art and experimented with newly developed media such as the synthetic binder used here in Faun and Parrot to build up the three-dimensional figure’s head. Following his return to Australia in 1960, he evolved a truly personal visual lexicon of mythic figures to populate his craggy, ‘back-to-Genesis’ landscapes, including fauns, bunyips, bushmen and explorers.

In ancient Greek and Roman mythology, fauns were creatures with human bodies and goats’ legs. For the Romans especially, they were regarded as genii, or spirits of a place. Whilst Tucker’s creature in Faun and Parrot is a mythical intruder – in contrast to the native bird – it seems in no way malign.  Sheltered by monumental eucalypts, the figure is powerfully totemic in its shroudlike robe.

Robert Hughes, writing in Art and Australia, commented perceptively on Tucker’s individualism – and his assured place as one of this country’s great twentieth-century painters. ‘Tucker’s pessimistic world-view explains why he has become a loner in Australian art, having little to do with other painters and drawing nothing from local movements’. So often his art reveals to us ‘a universe which is hostile normally and at best indifferent, ruled by inscrutable forces of nature and unredeemed moral conflict… Tucker has no followers except, in off moments, himself. But his place in the history of the local avant-garde is certain and prominent. Our culture needs more painters on the dark side of experience, men who can spend thirty years insisting, against all decorum, that art is not all sweetness and light…; that art can be an erratic yell, an irrational fear, a ritual in the dark, an exorcism, a dirge for lost innocence, or a supplication for a dead god’. ¹

1. ‘Albert Tucker’, Art and Australia, I, 4, February 1964, pp. 255, 259.