Allen Tucker was born on July 29, 1866 in Sterling Heights, N. Y. (since incorporated in Brooklyn), the older of two sons of Richard Sands and Margaret Allen (Auchmuty) Tucker. His father was president of the Tucker-Carter Cordage Company in New York City, inherited in the family since its founding in 1790.
The boy Allen was in Europe from his ninth to his eleventh year, and this stay made a lasting impression; his resulting desire to become a painter was opposed by his parents, and in compromise he took the course in architecture at Columbia College, being graduated, Ph. B. , in 1888.
Then, while a draftsman with Richard Morris Hunt, he studied painting at the Art Students' League in New York from 1891 to 1895; in 1894 he served as the League's vice-president. His most influential teacher, John H. Twachtman, transmitted a basically impressionist technique but, more importantly, imparted the concept of a personally accented style.
In 1895, he became a partner in the architectural firm of McIlvaine and Tucker; he resigned in 1904 and at the age of thirty-eight commenced the realization of his youthful desire to give all his effort to painting.
Working much in pastel at first, he learned to simplify color. His early work in water color was handicapped by his training in architectural wash drawing; later, however, he attained such freedom that some critics, however mistakenly, preferred his water colors to his oils.
During the first decade of his painting career he worked much in Europe, exhibiting in leading cities there; and his style evolved from impressionism into an expressionism at first influenced by van Gogh. A mind responsive to so dynamic an art would naturally oppose the stodgy academicism which then dominated the American art world. So it is not surprising that Tucker was an active member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which in 1913 effected a new orientation in American art by presenting the European post-impressionists in the so-called Armory Show.
At the outbreak of the first World War Tucker joined the American Ambulance Service in France; this experience found voice in a volume of poetry, There and Here (1919), and in articles in leading periodicals. Upon this country's entry into the war, he served with the Red Cross in France.
After the war he not only returned to painting but also taught drawing and painting at the Art Students' League from 1921 to 1926.
In 1927-28 he delivered there some lectures which were first serialized in The Arts and then gathered into Design and the Idea (1930). One of his most characteristic writings is "The Wooden Indian and the Iron Deer" (North American Review, August 1923), full of wit and wisdom out of deep experience; an equally perceptive article, on American Indian life and art, is "Alcalde".
The final decade of Tucker's life was marked by a vigorously personalized maturity of style which fulfilled the conditions described in his own counsel to students--pictorial ideas arising out of spiritual growth which in turn pressures technique into continually fresh responses. The habitual emotionalism of his art now increased its impact with a dynamic brush calligraphy and a memorable luminosity of color. "The Pale Horse" of 1928, with its quietly tragic phosphorescence, was followed in 1931 by "The Review, " a medievally intense modern vision of a skeletonized Death reaping his harvest of war.
But "The Crucifixion" of 1936 is perhaps Tucker's most convincing demonstration of how a time-hallowed theme can be newly accented by an experiencing nature. Yet fine and memorable as Tucker's paintings often are, those who knew him will recall a personality still more vivid in direct speech, in sudden laughter, in reserved cordiality of bearing, in skeptical benevolence of expression scarcely veiling an eagerness to scare the rabbit of an idea out of the nearest conversational bush and chase it to the horizon.
He also wrote the monograph on Twachtman issued by the Whitney Museum of American Art (1931); and further brief writings continued to appear through 1936.
His death in New York City was followed by burial at Bedford, N. Y.
Allen Tucker was often called “the American Van Gogh. ” As his painting evolved, he did not fit into any tidy slot for description and was known as an individualist not easily categorized in American art history. His work appears in many major American museums and collections. His work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.
Quotations:
"The thing which we speak of as beauty does not have to be sought in distant lands. . . . It is here about us or it is nowhere. "
"We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them. "
He was active member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptor.
Quotes from others about the person
His closest friend, critic Forbes Watson, described him as “brilliantly communicative, passionately in love with art in all its forms, with an ear for music, an eye for painting . . . genial and provocative in talk. ” (Goley, in The Vibrant Landscape, 1997)
On February 12, 1895, Tucker was married Eufrasia R. L. Wesson in New York City, where they resided permanently. They had no children.
