Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

THE URBAN NOCTURNE Albert Tucker and John Perceval David Burnett Facing page Albert Tucker Australia b.1914 Study for 'Images of modern evil: Spring in Fitzroy' 1943 Gouache on paper on board 41X47.9cm Purchased 1995 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 The night comes, friend of the criminal, suddenly; It comes with wolfish steps and cruel passions; the sky Closes upon itself like an immense alcove, Man, furious, changes himself into a beast wild with love. Charles Baudelaire 1 I he intense flourish of artistic and literary activity that emerged in m Melbourne during the early years of the 1940s was a defining moment in the history of Australian art. Variously known as 'the angry years' the decade of'the angry penguins' or Australia's 'social realist' period, the artists who articulated the mood, the contradictions and social unrest of that time did so with unprecedented energy and commitment. Richard Haese has referred to the period as the 'second authentic school of painting in Australia', after the Heidelberg School.2 The bucolic virtues of the Heidelberg landscape tradition held little relevance for artists such as Albert Tucker and John Perceval. In any case the 'pastoral vision' of Australia had undergone a transformation during the interwar years as economic depression, hardship and social fragmentation completely overshadowed the utopian ideal of progress, employment and prosperity.3Albert Tucker's Study for 'Images o f modern evil: Spring in Fitzroy' 1943 and Tramstop 1946 and John Perceval's Railway by night (The State Theatre) 1943 (all in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection) are works that embrace and define the urban, modernist tone of painting in Melbourne during the early 1940s and exemplify the dramatic break with the dominant pastoral tradition of Australian painting. In the late 1930s the critic and writer Basil Burdett (who was particularly supportive of the raw, immediate painting styles of Danila Vassilieff and Josl Bergner Right Albert Tucker Tramstop 1946 Oil on canvas on board 35x47cm Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1995. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 and their choice of everyday subjects from the streets of Fitzroy) recognised that for Australian art to acquire a new vitality, it must look beyond the established values and conventions: The landscape setting of our life absorbs ... (our painters). The life itself is neglected. Our painting is like a novel without any characters. Landscape pervades our exhibitions like a recurring decimal monotonously repeated ad infinitum. Is there nothing in our life worth depicting on canvas ?4 The collusion of the city with the night, particularly during wartime 'brown-outs' in Melbourne, provided a potent image for the disorientation felt by young artists during the war years. The city was seen as a site of despair and moral corruption while the wholesome bush was still considered in the popular mind to be the true domain of the Australian character and identity. It is not surprising that artists such as Tucker, Perceval and other modernists of the 1940s found a resounding echo of their urban temperament in the extended poetic narrative of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. A further characteristic of the period was the pre-eminence of figuration in painting. In the work of Tucker and Perceval, figurative forms assumed a metaphorical rather than a descriptive role. Influenced by aspects of European Modernism, particularly Surrealism and the Expressionism of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz, Albert Tucker, in particular, adopted the figure as a means to signify the isolation of humanity. In discussing the body and its role as 182 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965