Background
Albert Lee Tucker was born on December 29, 1914 in Melbourne, Australia.
1939
Albert Tucker and Joy Hester
1944
Albert Tucker with a piece of driftwood
Albert Lee Tucker was born on December 29, 1914 in Melbourne, Australia.
Tucker had no formal art training. He was forced to leave school at 14 to help support his family. Since 1933, he attended evening classes at the Victorian Artists' Society for 7 years, where he learnt to draw from the model.
In the early 1930's, Albert Lee Tucker started his career as a commercial illustrator in Melbourne. During that time, he was instrumental in founding of the Contemporary Art Society together with Sidney Nolan, John Reed and other artists.
Tucker bought his first camera in 1939 to document his paintings and turned his lens on fellow artists in Melbourne in the 1940's, later acquiring the title of "accidental historian". During the Second World War, he worked in the Australian Army Medical Corps as an official war artist, attached to Heidelberg hospital, where he was required to draw wounded and burn patients for medical records. This experience culminated in a powerful series of works, known as "Images of modern evil", which featured striking visions of fear, violence and debauchery.
Tucker exhibited in the Anti-fascist exhibition in 1942 at the Contemporary Art Society, becoming the Society’s outspoken president from 1943 to 1947. During that time, he contributed his works to "Angry Penguins", a modernist magazine with an avant-garde artistic and literary bent.
In 1947, he left for Japan, where he saw the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the next thirteen years, the artist divided his time between Europe and the United States. He lived in Paris, where he discovered the work of Jean Dubuffet. Some time later, in Rome, Tucker met Alberto Burri, whose collagist technique led him towards a more experimental approach.
In 1960, Tucker returned to Australia, but he didn't want to stay there for a long period. Struck by the changes of metropolitan Melbourne, he decided to stay. Although, many of the paintings he produced in the 1960's and 1970's lacked the vision of his previous work, Tucker still retained his unique ability to develop semi-abstract icons, that somehow captured the spirit of the location or the essence of the portrayed individuals. His restless examination of shapes and forms, his use of disjointed animals or human heads with fractured or sometimes deeply gouged faces was constant.
Throughout his career, Tucker always wanted to make himself and all those, who had the opportunity to study his work, look beyond the prevailing social conventions and attempt to find, via an investigation of the darker side of humanity's inner soul, the moral and pyschological foundations for a more humane society.
Quotations: "If you've got a mouse in a box, the mouse is free within the box; but he is never free because the box contains him. He's both free and imprisoned at the same time. I feel this way about us. I suppose a painting is my own private battlefield where I am still in the process of exorcising my own demons."
Albert Lee Tucker was a member of the Heide Circle, a loose grouping of Australian artists.
Tucker married Joy Hester, an artist, in 1941, with whom he had a son, named Sweeney. Later, it was revealed, that the boy wasn't his biological son, and in 1947, the couple divorced. Joy Hester died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1960, and Sweeney committed suicide in 1979. Tucker married his second wife, Barbara Bilcock, in 1963.