Albert Tucker (artist) - Influences

Influences

Tucker's main inspirations can be divided into periods, although he was originally influenced by the depression, post-impressionists, expressionists and social realists, also keeping in mind his involvement with the Angry Penguins, and his responses to war.

Tucker's first significant works were produced during his involvement in the army. In 1940, Tucker was called up for army service and spent most of his time working in Heidelberg Military Hospital drawing patients suffering from horrific wounds and mental illnesses as a result of war. He produced three important works at this stage, Man at Table, a pen and ink illustration of a man whose nose had been sliced off by a shell fragment, The Waste Land, an image of death sitting on a stool watching and waiting, and Floating Figures, of two figures floating down a hall, a third with a demented smile. All of these images illustrated the horror and madness of war. At this time, Tucker was influenced by raw images of death and horror, wishing to present a blunt, direct, succinct image of war’s consequences. This is similar to the way social realists wish to present their messages, although Tucker’s actual delivery was surrealistic and expressionistic in appearance.

In 1942, Tucker was discharged from the war and returned to a Melbourne he did not like. He was particularly disgusted, but inspired by scenes of Melbourne’s nightlife, of a city he felt demonstrated a collapse of simple morality. He was shocked and outraged by images of schoolgirls trotting home to reappear wearing skimpy miniskirts made from Union Jacks and American flags, ready for a wild night in St. Kilda with the drunken American and Australian soldiers. In response he painted Victory Girls, an impression of American soldiers, pig-like, grinning and clutching the meager frames of young women in bawdy red lipstick, as if possessions or prizes of war, representing a clear confusion as to what war actually reaps. This painting was the catalyst for his series of works known as the Images of Modern Evil, all depicting similar nightlife and exploitation of women figures, or commodification of sex, symbolized in recurring motifs; sticks or skin-toned blobs with red smiles and single, elaborately styled eyes with curly lashes. As Tucker continues creating these images, the subjects become less and less human and occupy space in more and more disconnected ways; floating or melting, being abducted from above, slumped on the side of the road, lying in the shadows of movie theaters. His source is clear, after seeing immoral scenes of sex, abduction, confusion and clear gender stereotyping, and maintains the same surreal, expressionistic delivery with socially realistic content.

The post-war period did not bring peace to visions at first he had hoped for, explaining humanity's status after war as “irreparably damaged”, viewing the world with great anxiety and a loss of hope. In early 1947, Tucker traveled to Japan with the Australian army as an art correspondent, required to interpret the devastation he saw there. He produced a monochrome pen drawing called Hiroshima; it contains no figures, just the aftermath of complete devastation, with somber tents and shelters littering the landscape. During this time, Tucker was influenced by his sense of hopelessness after seeing the war, depression, and the fact that society had never improved.

Upon returning, he broke up with Joy Hester in 1945. Out of bitterness, Tucker left for Europe later in 1947 for the next 13 years. In England and Europe until 1958, Tucker painted many prostitutes, highly influenced by the fact that no city seemed to be free of this “disease” of prostitution, and so painted them in abundance.

He then moved to New York in 1958 and his subjects switched from the city to outback Australia, feeling rather homesick. Where some works of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale had reached international level, Tucker rejected them as being nationalistic. He depicted the landscape as being a harsh, barren and sterile wasteland. He distorted stereotypes and icons of the Australian bush, including convicts, Burke and Wills and the Kelly Gang. He was influenced by the sheer barrenness and hopelessness that the outback conveyed, and added these icons as pawns to the outback’s deadly game.

Throughout the 1960s, Tucker began to face many personal traumas. He had begun to form a good relationship with his son, Sweeny, who had been adopted by Sunday and John Reed, but unfortunately he committed suicide in 1979. A few years later, the Reeds both died within a week of each other. He began to feel that many of the people he had influenced in his life were quickly slipping away from him, looking back at Joy Hester, who had also died in 1960. As a tribute, and to immortalise his contemporaries, he produced the "Series of Faces I have met". The series saw Tucker move away from his most celebrated themes, and to variations of the Antipodean Head, a representation of an explorer’s conflict with the environment that eventually fuses the two together to become of the same element, as both the landscape and the heads were created using the same medium, texture and colour. His other major subjects were the “intruders” or “fauns” that became mindless metallic beings that patrolled dead environments with guns and weaponry. This added to his recurring themes of hopelessness and loss.