Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'a bearer of signs', particularly in the work of Tucker and Arthur Boyd, Charles Merewether has stated that, 'In uncovering or recognising the frailty of identity, the image of the body becomes a central and recurring motif for their critique and vision of the human condition and social domain'.5 Historically, the human form has been the most powerful device for the expression of the paradox of human frailty and ideal beauty. It is an image that is deeply embedded in cultural memory. For instance, images of the 'Madonna and Child' and the 'Crucifixion' denote the extremes of beauty and suffering. In the art of the twentieth century, the body has been fragmented, violated, and in very recent art of the electronic age, made redundant. It has also been the focus of artists who have seen in it the essence of a shared humanity. The First World War established a precedent in terms of the human capacity for corporeal violence and suffering. The mechanisation of death which accompanied the slaughter of the 1914-18 war in Europe produced a new attitude towards the human body which filtered into universal consciousness through film and photography. The Second World War was the ultimate apotheosis of this violence. The social, cultural and political factors that shaped Australia in the early 1940s were complex. During the Depression Australia felt the impact of the international economic crisis to a far deeper extent than it had experienced the rural downturn of the 1890s. Deprivation and social hardship were concentrated in the cities, producing an unprecedented milieu of unemployment, poverty and petty crime. As a political alternative to the conservative climate of the period, the Communist Party of Australia attracted a high membership among the disenfranchised workers of Australia. By 1943, Communist Party membership was over twenty thousand. Humphrey McQueen has pointed to how 'the two movements [Communism and Modernism] progressed similarly, but independently, except that the threat or promise of proletarian power was one Facing page John Perceval Australia b.1923 Railway by night (The State Theatre) 1943 Oil and tempera on canvas 76x57cm Purchased 1995 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 of the problems with which Modernism and its opponents had to grapple'.6 Tucker, Perceval, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan were embarking upon their respective créative journeys at a time that was characterised by these particular cultural and political events. A certain allegiance between the voice of the Angry Penguins journal (1940-46), the forum for exhibitions provided by the Contemporary Art Society and the activism and ideals of the Communist Party assisted in the radical break that was made with the provincialism of Australian art at the time. In August 1941 the government of Australia passed into the hands of Labor leader John Curtin, who remained prime minister until 1945. It was during Curtin's period of office that the Second World War assumed a new calibre of threat to Australia. Its escalation in the Pacific represented a dimension of what, until then, had been essentially a 'European war' and had a dramatic and penetrating effect on the collective psyche of the Australian people. Curtin shifted the emphasis of Australia's alignment from the United Kingdom to the United States of America as Japanese troops advanced southward through the Malay peninsula. In February 1942 British forces in Singapore surrendered to the invading Japanese. More than fifteen thousand Australian troops became prisoners of war and almost two thousand died during the campaign. This surrender was followed by the bombing of Darwin by Japanese aircraft, which ended the myth of Australian wartime isolation and filled the nation with a palpable sense of threat and fear. The Depression years formed the background to Albert Tucker's youth and early adulthood, while the war years defined the period of his first mature body of work as an artist. The wartime tenor of the period was acutely felt in Melbourne, which had a significant American military presence from 1942. In describing his memory of life during the early 1940s, Albert Tucker has referred to the 'blankness and anxiety and fear and desperation .. .7 It was this mood, he has stated, that was the well-spring of his powerful and disturbing series known as 'Images of modern evil'. This series grew directly from a personal and sustained response to the impact of the war years on what Charles Merewether called the 'social body' of Melbourne. The comparatively sudden arrival of thousands of American GIs in Melbourne, combined with the presence of the Australian soldiers and wartime curfews on the use of electric street lighting ('brown-outs'), had a dramatic impact on the conservatism of the city. Tucker has referred to himself at this time as 'the outraged Edwardian puritan', shocked by what he perceived to be rampant debauchery as Swanston Street and St Kilda Road became the settings for drunkenness, brawling and schoolgirl prostitution. Tucker saw in this mélange of fear, violence, sexuality and strangers a potent allegory of human degradation. In 1964 Robert Hughes commented on the emergence of the characteristic crescent form in Tucker's paintings of the period as 'the first appearance in Australia of a truly iconographie form, insistently recurring within and animating a group of paintings'.8Tucker has spoken of this pictorial element as something more than a compositional device: The crescent became a kind of key which unlocked an energy source ... if I painted and I didn't have that crescent in, I couldn't work, and the painting wouldn't gel ... But the moment I got that crescent shape in, the picture would fdl itself out, it was like automatic writing ... That key form, I am inclined to think, allowed an older personality to surface, one that usually lies buried in the deeper regions of the mind that is probably with us most of the time, but is suppressed 9 Tucker's Study for 'Spring in Fitzroy' 1943 employs this 'iconographie form' as the leering red mouth of a fragmented, splayed female figure. This study in gouache was a prelude to the completed work in oil, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Like most of Tucker's paintings from the period, detailed drawings and studies were an intrinsic stage in their development. This study differs only marginally in tonality and colouration from the completed oil, 184 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965