ALBERT TUCKER
Albert Tucker's expressionist paintings of society in disintegration and ruin were completed during the 1940s and typify the work of a generation of aspiring Australian modernists influenced by European artists who arrived in Melbourne in the 1930s, bringing with them a knowledge of Social Realism and Surrealism.
Tucker attended the Victorian Artists Society (1933-1936) but the main influence on his work was the Jewish refugee and Social Realist painter, Yosl Bergner. Tucker was also closely associated with the Melbourne avant-garde in the 1930s, contributing to The Angry Penguins magazine and assisting in founding the Contemporary Art Society (1938).
In 1942 he was conscripted and while in the Heidelberg Military Hospital, employed to draw injured and wounded soldiers for medical records. The experience traumatised Tucker and informed his Images of Modern Evil series (1943-46).
Revealing the influence of German Expressionism and artists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, he articulated a vision of humanity as sexually corrupt, devoid of morality and bestialised.
Tuckers work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition in 1989. His work is held at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
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