Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

warning signs. These were part of the background if one went around Melbourne a lot. Once, as a very keyed-up late adolescent, I remember being caught on a tram track by traffic, and there was a tram bearing down on me. I remember I went into a state of complete panic. It always stayed in my mind that a tram was a perfect symbol for the threat of atrocious mutilation, a rattling roar getting louder and louder, a green dragon bearing down out of the night.12 While Tucker's 'Images of modem evil' and 'Night images' represent a body of work that has come to define wartime Melbourne, some of the first paintings of the urban nocturne were completed by John Perceval, who had moved to Melbourne from Western Australia in 1934. He enlisted in the army in 1939 but saw no active duty, due to disabilities from poliomyelitis. He was assigned to the cartographic section of the Army Survey Corps where he met Albert Tucker and Guy Boyd. In 1942, at the age of 19, Perceval exhibited with Tucker, Boyd and Sidney Nolan in the 'Anti-Fascist Exhibition' at the Contemporary Art Society. His contribution to the exhibition, Exodus from a bombed city 1942 (NGV), is considered to be his first major oil painting and while it reflected the social realism of Josl Bergner and Noel Counihan, the work was essentially an allegory of human folly and suffering. For Perceval, as for Albert Tucker, 1943 was a year of energetic production and creative exploration. A simple stylistic comparison of the two artists certainly reveals similarities. However, a deeper investigation of Perceval's imagery raises significant differences in approach and philosophy. In both of the major monographs on Perceval, emphasis is placed on the influence of childhood memories in the shaping of the artist's work and vision.13 Until the age of 11, Perceval lived on a remote wheat and sheep farm some 220 kilometres east of Perth. The open landscape and isolation of this period had a reverberating influence, with the richness and textures of those memories surfacing in a number of ways in the artist's work. His personal iconography ranges widely from moons, night skies, hens, children and trains to vast biblical landscapes. Perceval's urban subjects are conceived in terms of generalities rather than the specific locales and social themes that characterise Tucker's work of the period. Richard Haese has pointed to the difference of intent that underpins Perceval's work: Any attempt to interpret the 1943 paintings of Perceval as contemporary social comment does not take us far. They do not offer images of the present, but a record of the past in which the vulnerability of the child is contrasted with a world in which nothing is certain except cruelty, and all things are to be distrusted.14 Railway by night (The State Theatre) 1943 would appear to contradict this assertion in its apparent specificity. However, this view of the State Theatre (now the Melbourne Revival Centre), seen from the Flinders Street railway yards, is much more than a description of urban topography. Perceval appropriates the architectural details of the cultural monument, together with the industrial geometry of the railway signals, tracks and engine in the foreground, in order to generate a carnivalesque atmosphere. The shallow picture space is emphasised through the use of the silhouetted engine against the garish, blazing lights of the theatre. The engine steaming through the foreground, belching smoke and fire, adds a menacing presence to the painting, while the relative scale of the building and the train is thrown into bizarre confusion with the appearance of the ambiguous floating crescent form in the night sky. Moon, boat, hen — an aerial 'ship of fools' perhaps? — Above Cover of the 1945 edition of the Angry Penguins journal designed by Albert Tucker. Photograph courtesy James Hardie Library, Brisbane Left Albert Tucker Memory of Leonski 1943 Oil on composition board 61x78.6cm Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Shell Company of Australia Limited, Founder Benefactor, 1995 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne the viewer is left to decide. In the spirit of a child's game, played alone in the dark, the doorway and windows of the theatre's facade momentarily assume the guise of a monstrous face (not unlike the entrance to Luna Park) before reason demands that they be read as doors and windows once again. For Perceval, the night was the domain of the imaginary, ft was the setting for many paintings during 1943-44, and unlike Tucker's mantle of gloom, Perceval's night is the province of fantastic dreaming and personal allegories. In the early 1940s the art of Albert Tucker and John Perceval was radical and explorative. It emerged from a unique period of Australian painting in which the alignment of a number of social, political and cultural factors created a climate of intellectual and creative freedom. Apart from the Contemporary Art Society and the support of patrons John and Sunday fteed, there was virtually no market for the work of this group of artists. However, in subsequent decades, they have received the critical attention and retrospective exposure necessary for the recognition of their rich contribution to the development of twentieth-century Australian art. David Burnett is an education officer at the Queensland Art Gallery. THE URBAN NOCTURNE 187