Design and Art Australia Online

Albert Tucker was born in Melbourne, on 29 December 1914. His grandfather and namesake was Albert Lee Tucker, MLA, three times mayor of Fitzroy. When he died, Albert’s father John had inherited a stationer’s business, but he had disliked being a small businessman and by the time Albert was born was working on railway maintenance. His wife Clara was more aspirational, but without sufficient income the family found life difficult. Albert left school young, and with his brother worked at subsistence jobs throughout the Great Depression. By 1934 he was working at John Vickery’s commercial art studio in Collins Street and drawing freelance illustrations for women’s magazines. This brought him into contact with Melbourne’s creative artistic community, including the young Sam Atyeo, and the conservative Sir John Longstaff. In 1933 he began attending evening classes at the Victorian Artists Society. A year later one of his fellow students was Joy Hester who was to become his first wife. Other evenings were spent at the old reading room of the State Library, where he read as widely as he could. He also haunted Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop, and befriended the proprietor. Tucker exhibited for the first time at the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1933. A self portrait of 1937 attracted the attention of the Herald's art critic, Basil Burdett, and he left his full-time job in favour of freelance illustration and developing his art. The same year he took some classes at the George Bell school but soon left,preferring to direct his own learning. Along with Bell and other discontented artists Tucker became a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938. In 1939 he bought a second hand camera, and it his photographs that so memorably record the life in the Angry Penguins circle in the 1940s.Through his friendship with Harry de Hartog and others he became involved in the Artists’ Branch of the Communist Party.
He became romantically involved with Joy Hester in 1938, and in 1939 they moved in together. They married in 1941 ***
When he enlisted in the Army, his status as an artist led to him making illustrations for the officers at the **** and after a bout of pneumonia was medically discharged. His time in hospital meant that he saw shell-shocked soldiers and profoundly injured soldiers newly returned from the front, and memories of them continued to haunt him for the rest of his life, and coloured the direction of his art. ****

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2012