The Drawings of Albert Tucker

Throughout his career as an artist, Albert Tucker (born 1914) has generally used drawing as a process of building towards painting. Apart from the self-imposed discipline of drawing from the model – which he followed early in his career and to which he has returned increasingly in the last two years — the artist's drawing has nearly always been closely related to his painting. Partly because of this relationship, Tucker's drawings make extensive use of the most painterly of drawing media — pastel, watercolour and gouache.

At times, however, Tucker has used drawing as a substitute for painting. Indeed, like most young artists of his generation, he had a real struggle to obtain materials such as oil paint and canvas during much of the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing was often the only affordable way of working.

In the early 1940s Tucker emerged as an artist with his own trenchant style from an intense and divided cultural milieu. Among Melbourne's avant-garde of the late 1930s and early 1940s, spontaneity was a highly regarded quality in painting. The vigorous paintings of Danila Vassilieff (the Russian-born artist whose work had a considerable impact on the young Tucker) and the drawings and paintings of Tucker's Australian contemporaries Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan were powerful and spontaneous outpourings that demonstrated a direct, unmediated approach to painting. Tucker's procedure was, and still is, different. Although he has occasionally used spontaneity as a strategy to introduce another element to the creative process, Tucker does not depend upon an alla prima approach in his art. His paintings are the result of an intense and often repetitious process of drawing, through which he discovers, refines and compresses his imagery. A distinction is made, however, between mechanical repetition, which Tucker considers pointless and dangerous, and struggling repetition, whereby an idea is relentlessly re-worked until it yields its potential.

Tucker's development of certain subjects and themes over a period of time was also related to a process of re-thinking his images. The self-portrait is one such note that chimes from the beginning of his career until the 1980s, and the artist's evolution of this subject demonstrates his developing interest in expressive forms of art. Tucker's earliest self-portrait was made in 1936 and, like his 1937 portrait of Hal Porter — with its nod towards polite English modernism — is relatively straightfoward. The two self-portraits made in 1939 have an intense, searching quality which Tucker extended in his study for the 1941 self-portrait. To express psychological dimensions of anxiety and confusion, the artist has wrenched the face into fragments — a twisted mouth, flaring nostrils and staring eyes. In a pastel of 1942, Psycho, Tucker used a similar device to express the shattered mind of a shell-shocked soldier in the military hospital at Heidelberg.

The 1941 self-portrait and the Psycho drawing herald the process by which Tucker dissolved the face into a set of isolated and freely combined expressive elements – mouth, eyes and nose. In the mid-1940s the mouth became a grinning red crescent, which was usually combined with a stalk eye to create an abstracted visage. The red crescent has been a constant motif in the artist's work from that period.

The most recent of Tucker's self-portraits is the watercolour he made in 1984 as part of a group of portraits that cast a retrospective glance over his life. Started in the late 1970s, the series included a number of watercolours of people who had a significant impact on his life or ideas. John Reed, for example, whose portrait Tucker painted in watercolour in 1978, was a central figure in his discovery of contemporary art. For Tucker, as for many other young artists of his generation, John and Sunday Reed provided company and access to the latest ideas in politics, art and literature, and together they inspired confidence among artists to explore contemporary forms of expression.

By the beginning of the 1940s, through his empathy with German Expressionism and his discovery of international Surrealism, Tucker had created a rich artistic soil in which to develop his ideas. Wartime Melbourne provided the seeds for images which were to grow as flowers of evil. Tucker spent a brief and miserable time in the army in 1942, when, for the first time, he focused upon drawing as an important independent medium. In the military hospital at Heidelberg the artist made a number of pastel drawings of physically shattered and psychotic soldiers, and of cadavers in the hospital morgue. The sense of tragedy that dominates these drawings was the same emotion that, also in 1942, the Sydney artist Eric Wilson discovered in the inmates of the Lidcombe Hospital and Arthur Boyd observed in the inhabitants of South Melbourne.

A sense of folly and evil first appears in Tucker's work in the drawings he made at Wangaratta early in 1942. His savage, ironically titled drawing Joie de vivre projects a view of humanity which was to culminate in paintings of bestial soldiers grotesquely fondling 'victory girls'. The all-pervasive disquiet of wartime Melbourne gave rise to Tucker's first extraordinary series of paintings, collectively entitled Images of Modern Evil. The artist made numerous preparatory drawings for these paintings, often of subjects he had observed in the suburb of St. Kilda. They were mostly small notations in ink and pencil, with colour notes, made on sketchbook pages.

At least two highly finished drawings emerged from the series Images of Modern Evil, both of which were produced in 1945 for magazine covers — one for the Melbourne University Magazine, and one for the Angry Penguins. The Angry Penguins drawing could well serve as a catalogue of Tucker's Images of Modern Evil. The street scene is strewn with dehumanized female forms, helpless and naked; in the foreground sits a drunken, grinning soldier; in the background a group of figures rise in the cone of light from a street lamp, and a tram veers out of the dark city. All these forms are recurrent images in Tucker's iconography.

While most of the drawings made in 1944 and 1945 were essentially preparatory to painting, the role of drawing as a substitute for painting comes to the fore during the years Tucker spent in Europe after 1947. His early European years were restless; he was financially impoverished and could only afford materials for drawing. In London in 1947-48, and later in Paris, Tucker made some of his most finished gouaches. Picasso's work, which was a major influence on almost all artists in Paris at that time, informs many of his Paris drawings. However, it was the uniquely moral dimension in Tucker's art, rather than Picasso's formal influence, that was the driving force behind his most powerful images.

This is particularly noticeable in the small group of drawings made in 1951, when the artist was working at Neuglsenburg near Frankfurt in American-occupied Germany. The prostitute had been a recurring image in Tucker's St. Kilda and Paris periods, and in Germany the artist found the potent combination of sex and death which had also been at the heart of the Images of Modern Evil. In this war-worn German town, the prostitutes worked among ruined buildings in alleyways of rubble that in summer smelt of buried, rotted bodies. Tucker's 1951 drawing Girl is among the artist's strongest statements about the duality of fertility and mortality, a concept that has fascinated him all his life.

In Europe Tucker developed the literary dimension of his art. Earlier in his career the influence of Surrealism had often had a literary quality — for example, some of his works were inspired by the poetry of T.S. Eliot, which he interpreted in a particularly literal way. But in Europe in the late 1950s Tucker's paintings drew on the traditions of classical mythology and Christian iconography. While his drawings of the period included few religious images, Tucker made a number of delightfully free and colourful drawings of fauns.

Tucker's increasing interest in mythology — which inevitably was most intense during the years he spent in Italy — turned towards Australian subject matter in his last years in Europe and the United States. Tucker's interest was in archetypal Australian characters — explorers and bushrangers — that had resonances in European mythology, literature and religion. The saga of the doomed explorer Lasseter, for instance, inspired his imagination. In a series of gouaches made around 1978 Tucker has clearly been fascinated by the resemblance between the explorer and those desert saints beset by visions, temptations and earthly torments.

While the landscape in these works is echoed in the craggy visages of the explorer and bushranger figures, Tucker presents a more direct and less tortured view of landscape in his drawings of the bush around his home in Hurstbridge and, more recently, the relaxed drawings of the bayside beaches of Port Phillip Bay.

By the 1970s Tucker had refined his highly individual imagery through the practice of drawing. However, these drawings remained largely hidden from view until the second half of the decade, when they were brought to light, placed in public collections and exhibited for the first time. The Australian National Gallery's extensive collection of Tucker's drawings was mainly acquired in 1976 and 1979.

Tucker's examination of his own past has manifested itself not only in a personal rediscovery of his drawing oeuvre, but also in his project to draw and paint portraits of significant acquaintances made during his artistic career. Tucker made several watercolours and a considerable number of oil paintings of fellow artists, writers and friends. Of these, Tucker has said:

My whole structural aesthetic of any painting is of the static image on the surface that operates through impact, instantaneous impact. One savours it through the reverberations afterwards but the important thing is to get a unified single 'BANG' right between the eyes and the reverberations extend this initial impact and then you really experience the work.

(Albert Tucker: Faces I Have Met, exhibition catalogue [Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1985], p.6.)

It is in the context of this aesthetic, of investing the static image with expressive power, that the practice of drawing has been, and remains, a process central to Tucker's art.

Andrew Sayers