ALBERT LEE TUCKER
On this day of 29th December, Albert Lee Tucker (29 December 1914 – 23 October 1999), was born in Melbourne, Australia.
He was an artist, and member of the Heide Circle, a group of modernist artists and writers that centered on the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, whose home, "Heide", located in Bulleen, near Heidelberg (outside Melbourne), was a haven for the group.
Tucker left school at 14 to help support his family and had no formal art training, but obtained work as a house painter, cartoonist, and commercial illustrator, in an advertising agency before joining the commercial artist John Vickery. For seven years he attended the Victorian Artists' Society evening life drawing class three nights a week.
Tucker's main inspirations include post-impressionists, expressionists, and social realists, as well as personal experience. Tucker's work was strongly influenced by the realistic reflections of two important émigré artists, Josl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff. Tucker also met Sunday and John Reed, members of the Contemporary Art Society.
Tucker's first significant works were produced during his involvement in the army. He produced three important works at this stage, Man at Table, The Waste Land, and Floating Figures.
An impression of Australian soldiers, clutching young women was the catalyst for his series of works known as the Images of Modern Evil, Victory Girls, depicting Melbourne nightlife.
Tucker also took to photography, both of his own paintings, and to record the ideas and scenes he used to compose them, and inadvertently created a document of his time.
Tucker became associated with the Angry Penguins, a group of modernist artists including Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, and Noel Counihan.
In 1959, Tucker won the Australian Women's Weekly Prize, which enabled him to spend two years in New York producing the Manhattan Series and Antipodean Heads.
In 1960 he was awarded the Kurt Geiger Award by MOMA Australia which he used to return to Australia and mount his first Australian solo exhibition. He subsequently settled in Victoria.
In 1990 the National Gallery of Australia held a retrospective of his work.
