Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

while the division of the picture space and the diagonal gesture of abandonment remain virtually unaltered. A painted decorative border/frame is the most obvious addition to the final painting. Tuckers surrealist and expressionist debts are apparent in Study for 'Spring in Fitzroy’, in the dislocation and fragmentation of the body. This violation of the human form had been part of modernist pictorial language since the early years of the twentieth century. Graphic images of violence and wartime atrocities had circulated since the First World War, and Dada and surrealist artists in Europe adopted the fragmented body as a metaphorical device in their exploration of the subconscious mind. Tuckers experience at the Heidelberg Military Hospital during 1942, making medical drawings of the wounds, gas burns and disfigurements of frontline soldiers, had directly exposed the artist to the trauma and violence of war. Most writers discussing this period have noted the variety of cultural influences that filtered into Australia during the 1940s through publications and reproductions. 'The Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art', held at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1939, introduced Australian audiences and artists to some major examples of European contemporary art including works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Vlaminck, cubist paintings and collages by Picasso, and surrealist works by Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico. Magazines such as Art in Australia, and the Angry Penguins journal published by Max Harris and John Reed, contributed largely to the dissemination of modernist aesthetics, carrying articles and reproductions by European writers and artists in addition to publishing the work of Australian painters and critics. Study for 'Spring in Fitzroy' is an early work in the 'Images of modern evil' series. It is dated 24 February 1943 and is compositionally related to a work in oil completed in the same month ( Memory of Leonski 1943, National Gallery of Victoria), which was based on the violent murder of three women in May 1942 by Edward Joseph Leonski, an American GI on leave in Melbourne. Tucker's Victory girls (NGA), which has assumed an almost emblematic position in relation to wartime Melbourne, was also completed in 1943. Works from the period share a number of pictorial signs and influences such as the crescent mouth, references to the American presence in Melbourne, and the severe, even brutal, distortions and truncations of the body. Writer Christopher Uhl has cited Picasso's works of the early 1920s and, in particular, the radical distortion and fragmentation of his 'Bathers' of 1927 and 1929 as validating Tucker's assignation of the body as fetish and emblem of human corruption: The contrast in all three works (Memory of Leonski 1943, Journey to Orcus 1943 [NGA] and Spring in Fitzroy 1943) between enormously heavy limbs and pin-head point implicitly to a contrast between great physical power and a conversely minuscule intelligence for controlling and directing that power.10 Fragments of the American flag appear in several works from the period. The striped fragment in the lower right of Study for 'Spring in Fitzroy ' appears to be related to a series of'plume-like' forms which may, in turn, refer to the skirts fashioned from flags which were worn by the 'victory girls'. Tucker has stated: All these school girls from fourteen to fifteen would rush home after school and put on short skirts made out of flags — red, white and blue — and go tarting along St Kilda with the GIs and, of course, diggers — when the diggers could get a look in, because they were all poor men compared with the Americans.1 Flags also form a significant element in the distant cityscape visible through the balcony window in the top left of the picture — a further reference to what Tucker no doubt saw as an American 'occupation' of the city. The early works from Tucker's 'Images of modern evil' series dealt directly with the impact of the war on society. Evil was not conceived in biblical terms of'the fall' but rather as an insidious, degraded condition of civilisation. The hypocrisy and pretence of 'respectable society' were equally the abode of evil as was the more obvious savagery of the battlefield. Tucker's painting Tramstop 1946 represents a later development in the series where a nocturnal, almost subterranean atmosphere pervades the pictures. (Historically, the 'nocturne' was a specific genre of painting — poetic reveries of evening light and pastoral idylls). In many of the paintings of both Tucker and John Perceval of the early 1940s, the fading light of day is dramatically transformed into an oppressive gloom which blankets the urban landscape of Melbourne. The electric illumination of the city at night provided both artists with pictorial elements that could be manipulated and articulated in paint to produce eerie, shadowy images. Street lights and neon hoardings, reflected moonlight and the safety beacons of trams wash the streets of inner city Melbourne with an acrid green and yellow glow. The figures in Tramstop are illuminated by a variety of light sources, including the single shaded yellow bulb which became a signature motif in Tucker's oeuvre. The liaison taking place in this work is tawdry and gratuitous. The tram, which bears down on what appears to be a figure observing the seedy exchange from the shadows, also assumed a dominant and menacing presence in the series: In the blackout there would be strange kinds of lighting effects from the moon and traffic lights. The lights of trams were converted into 186 BROUGHTTO LIG HT: Australian Art 1850-1965