Albert Tucker

Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide
Private collection, United States of America; purchased from the above in 1966
Australian, International and Contemporary Paintings, Christie's, Melbourne, 22 November 2005, lot 57
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Albert Tucker, Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide, 13-31 March 1966, cat. 11
Hinterlands: Albert Tuckers' landscape 1960-1975, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 28 June 2008-22 February 2009

Lesley Harding, Hinterlands: Albert Tuckers landscape 1960-1975, Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2008, pp. 6 (illus.), 32

This work is in good stable condition.
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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. Certainly (as Gavin Fry has noted) 'the impact on his painting was immediate and profound. For twenty-five years he had painted from the imagination, from literary sources and a stylised and symbolic vision of human frailty. At Hurstbridge he was spellbound by the bush around him, the sight, sound, and smell of nature pressing up against the windows of his studio. He began to paint and draw the forms and colours of "his" patch of bush. Close-ups of the massive eucalypt trunks, with their peeling stringy bark, long drooping leaves and great burls supplanted the cratered landscape of his outback imagination.'¹  He even 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...'²

Reviewing the work which emerged from this close encounter with landscape, Bernard Smith described a new sense of harmony, even 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.'³  Robert Hughes was similarly impressed, though less by the illusionism and more by the works' pure aesthetic qualities: 'The minimum shape, the minimum gesture: but a brilliant range of emotional impact, from a gently romantic cluster of leaf-dappled trunks to one big bole, spearing upwards with ferocious energy. Midway between abstract and natural shape, Tucker's trees are supercharged by both.'⁴

Bush handsomely demonstrates the achievement of Tucker's Hurstbridge landscapes. Standing proud in front of a scrubby grey-green background screen are the trunks of two manna gums, wearing skirts of bark rendered in dynamic dashes and curves of impasto paint. Their powerful presence is anthropomorphic, even heroic, but there is no iconic heaviness, the picture (and the viewer) being lifted up by the fresh, tingling, almost psychedelically bright greens and pinks of the peeled eucalypt skins.

1.  Gavin Fry, Albert Tucker, Sydney: Beagle Press, 2005, p. 198
2.  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, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, in association with Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2006, pp. 230, 235
3.  Bernard Smith, 'Pottery relics from an older London', The Age, 27 April 1966, p. 5
4.  Robert Hughes, Nation, 3 November 1962, p. 17