ALBERT TUCKER

Bonython-Meadmore Gallery, Adelaide; purchased by the present owner's father in August 1987
Private collection, Melbourne

Albert Tucker: Faces I have met, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 16 April - May 1985
Albert Tucker: Faces I have met, Bonython Meadmore Gallery, Adelaide, 24 July - 19 August 1987 (label on the reverse)
On loan to the Riddoch Art Gallery, Mount Gambier, December 1987 - December 1989
On loan to the Sale Regional Arts Centre, Sale, Victoria, 1991-2007

Albert Tucker, Faces I have met, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1985, including an interview with James Mollison
Anthony Clarke, 'Albert Tucker's people', The Age, 13 April 1985, Saturday Extra, p. 3, illus.
Gary Catalano, 'Faces Tucker has met', The Age, 17 April 1985
Ronald Millar, 'An intimate view of old friends', The Herald, Melbourne, 18 April 1985
Robert Rooney, 'Tucker faces up to old age in soap opera', The Australian, 26 April 1985, p. 10
Elizabeth Butel, 'The self-purging of an artist', The National Times, 26 April - 2 May 1985, p. 3
Leigh Astbury, '"Faces I have met" – Tucker's portrait of an era', Art and Australia, vol. 23, no. 1, summer 1985, p. 176
Richard Haese, 'Albert Tucker', Overland, December 1985
Albert Tucker, Faces I have met, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1986, p. 26, illus.

When this portrait of Sidney Nolan was exhibited in 1985, in the extraordinarily powerful exhibition that Tucker called ‘Faces I have met’, it was described as ‘perhaps the most immediately striking of all the portraits’.¹ Another, earlier and smaller portrait in the same exhibition showed Nolan as a ravaged, haunted man in 1977 – just a year after his wife Cynthia had taken her own life in London. Here in contrast, in the present portrait, Sir Sidney Nolan, OM, is dressed in a suit and tie fit for the highest society and set against the endless space of the Australian outback – as though within one of the Central Australian desertscapes that first brought him international fame in the 1950s. In fact the colours of this landscape background also subtly suggest the blue and gold of Nolan’s most famous Ned Kelly paintings of the 1940s.

One of the catalysts for Tucker’s embarkation on his series of portraits as a concerted project was the deaths of John and Sunday Reed in December 1981. The several portraits of the Reeds, of Nolan and of himself are the core of the group, while others depict members of the 1940s ‘Heide’ circle including Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Danila Vassilieff, John Sinclair and Barrett Reid. There were almost sixty portraits in total shown at Tolarno Galleries in 1985 and Tucker explained at the time: ‘I wanted to deal with past history, a forty-year episode really. … these people were part of my artistic life and human background… The important thing for me was to recreate their presence and fix them so that they would have some kind of immortality’.²

Not only had the Reeds died, within weeks of each other, but during the following year Nolan and Tucker entered a period of estrangement, apparently precipitated by offence perceived and taken at the opening of the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, which lasted until shortly before Nolan’s death. Tucker thus felt both a profound sense of loss and a renewed awareness of the complexities of that intense, rich, creative period in which all their lives had been inextricably entwined forty years earlier. His aim was to achieve ‘maximum realization and confrontation’ of the personality of each subject as he had experienced it over decades; to rid himself of ‘any malice or negative feelings about my subjects’. As Richard Haese points out, the series is unique in that Tucker was the first participant and witness of a major Australian cultural movement to paint a visual account of the men and women who created it.

The relationship between Tucker and Nolan was always potent – and is vividly and uniquely brought to life in this portrait. The depth of their friendship over decades has been recently documented in the wonderful Bert & Ned, The Correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan, edited by Patrick McCaughey.³  And yet from the beginning it was often fraught with envy and insecurity. Tucker here portrays both the outward persona – the Irish charm, the astuteness and elegance – and the inward-looking, intensely private artist he knew so well. As Gary Catalano perceptively observed, his colleague and rival is ‘the very model of stability and accomplishment. This, we are meant to understand, is how the subject himself would like to be remembered’. But, at the same time, Tucker invokes someone who might be fragile, whose expression speaks even of bewilderment and loss: ‘Peer into those blue eyes, Tucker seems to be saying, and you’ll look straight through this man to the blue sky behind his head’.⁴

1.     Richard Haese in Tucker, A., Faces I have met, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1986, p. 7.
2.     Introduction to Faces I have met, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1985; quoted by Haese, op. cit., p. 2.
3.     The published letters date from 1944 to 1977; Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2006.
4.     The Age, 17 April 1986.