ALBERT TUCKER

The artist
Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label on reverse)
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1966; thence by descent to the present owner
Private collection, Melbourne

Albert Tucker, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 April - 13 May 1966, cat. 24

Work is in very good, original condition.
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Albert Tucker's best-known pictorial invention is the 'Antipodean Head', that 'sunburned, blistered,battered, scarred, damaged, weathered and crater-riddled' mask, that 'hatchet head, like a map of Australia on its side.'¹

For the artist, the form 'summarised the jutting aggressiveness of the Australian character as it fought to tame a wild and unbroken continent, and he linked the human image to the land it wrestled with by painting the face as though it was a stark and rugged landscape scarred by dark ravines, by arid plateaux and dusty hollows, bone dry, rock hard and as forbidding as a dangerous weapon... Tucker... played many variations on this central theme, but the fusion of man and his environment into a composite image ... dominated his painting like an obsession.'²

Returning to Australia in 1960 after more than a decade overseas, Tucker bought a five-acre bush block at Hurstbridge, north-east of Melbourne, and built a home and studio there. Hurstbridge was then still some distance from the urban fringe, and Tucker (and his new love Barbara Bilcock) evidently enjoyed the bush isolation. He wrote to his old friend Sidney Nolan: 'I go to the city as little as possible, it bores and irritates me. The air that blows through here, rinsed out by the trees, must be too clean...' and ' The only sustaining thing is the bush...' ³

In paintings from the mid-1960s there begins to develop a curious disjunction between the existential angst of the Antipodean masks - whether Explorers, Gamblers, Convicts, Intruders, Fauns or Totems - and an evident delight in the forest landscape of the Diamond Creek valley and its rich birdlife.  'The second-storey studio space permitted an outlook onto the trunks and canopy of the local eucalypts and a close view of crimson rosellas that darted past the windows... these brightly colored birds infiltrated many of the pictures Tucker made there, landscapes and figure paintings alike.'⁴

Reviewing the artist's 1966 Australian Galleries exhibition, Bernard Smith described a new sense of harmony, if not quite contentment. 'It is... somewhat strange to find oneself enjoying most, in such an artist, the skill and economy with which he can paint a bunch of gum leaves or the striking illusionism of the painting of a gum-tree trunk... There seems to be a real tussle going on here between an old sense of anger and a new sense of acceptance. Perhaps that is why the parrot image remains so important; they screech and yet they belong.' ⁵

The present work was included in that 1966 exhibition, and, like the closely-related painting formerly in the Elders-IXL Collection,⁶ well demonstrates the truth of Smith's observations.  There is typical frontier agony in the taut-faced, square-shouldered, black-clad Intruder, in the spanner-headed parrots and in the spindly treeskeleton on the right. Yet the rich rose-gold glow of the desert horizon, the streaked and crusted coffee and cream gum trunk and the rainbow brightness of the parrots' plumage suggest a direct, unmediated sensuous response, even the beginning of some kind of reconciliation between the man and the land.

1. Lily Brett, ' The inspired and Inspiring Albert Tucker', Pol International, 1970; Laurie Thomas, 'Albert Tucker', in The Most Noble Art of them All: the selected writings of Laurie Thomas, Univerity of Queensland Press. St Lucia, 1976, p. 296
2. James Gleeson, 'Grains of Truth', Sun-Herald, 11 April 1965, p. 97
3. Albert Tucker to Sidney Nolan, November 1963 and 16 December 1964, in Patrick McCaughey (ed.), Bert & Ned: the correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, in association with Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2006, pp. 230, 235
4. Lesley Harding, 'Images and Imaginings: Albert Tucker's Landscapes' in Hinterlands: Albert Tucker's Landscapes 1960 - 1975, Heide Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2008, p. 32
5. Bernard Smith, 'Pottery relics from an older London', The Age, 27 April 1966, p. 5
6. Intruder and Parrots, 1965, sold Sotheby's, Melbourne, 23 May 2005, lot 41, $329,500