Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

In Hester's drawing the girl's blood-red eyes are fearful, haunted, the quickly slashed teeth and mouth compressed, chin down.6 Thick, black outlines cast her as diminutive, the victim, a figure for whom we extend sympathy. Hester had witnessed the flesh trade of the streets when she and Tucker lived in St Kilda in 1945. Richard Haese has observed that Tucker held 'a vision of a city in moral ruin and decay'.7 Hester's work appears less judgemental, and is more evocative of a woman's experience of war and sexual violence. While Hester's Man and tree does not directly relate to these works, it does belong to this period (sometime between 1945 and 1947). Man and tree is known to have come from the collection of Albert Tucker and would have been produced before Tucker and Hester separated in April 1947.8The raw ugliness of the image lacks the stylised emotion which Hester increasingly adopted in these years, and it may therefore have been executed closer to 1945. Certainly its male subject could be a soldier or some other victim of war. Hester herself did not appear to take part in the war effort in any direct way. Tucker had been drafted into the army in April 1942, though he was not posted overseas. Until discharged in October that year, Tucker served inWangaratta and at the Heidelberg Military Hospital, where he sketched the physically and psychologically wounded. One may assume that Tucker discussed his experience with Hester, perhaps showing her the drawings. Tucker's The possessed 1942 (NGA) relates to this experience, with the artist using surrealist distortion to indicate trauma. The figure, situated in a deeply perspectival cell, is reduced to little more than an eye, tears, part of a gaping mouth, fingers clutching its forehead, and feet. John Reed and Max Harris, publishers of the Angry Penguins journal, in 1945 also published Reg S. Ellery's book, Psychiatric Aspects of Modern Warfare, which dealt with the 'psychoneuroses' of war, as distinct from the physical casualties.9Hester is known to have seen newsreels of the liberation of the German concentration camps in 1945, including Auschwitz in January and Bergen-Belsen in April.10 Certain of her drawings appear to deal directly with the victims of war and the death camps, such as Victim and Mother and child c.1945 (both private collection), the latter a graphic depiction of death by hanging.1 But what is of interest is that her image of the discarded figure in Victim c.1945 bears a remarkable similarity to the prone figure in the drawing Birth o f Sweeney (Sleep) c.1945 (private collection) in which the figure is asleep beside what appears to be awire-mesh fence. A second brush and ink drawing of the same period, also entided Birth o f Sweeney (private collection), focuses closely on the resting figure's naked upper torso, now clearly female, head raised slightly with eyes gazing past us, content, a tree bearing fruit springing from her stomach, a tiny embryonic creature held in her hand. Nature is used here as an allegorical device, just as Sidney Nolan presented a romantic fusion of man and tree in his cover image, Perched on the sole Arabian tree, for the Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins in autumn 1944. That Hester had associated the victims of the war and the camps with her own pregnancy and the birth of her son Sweeney, may be explained by the fact that she had tried unsuccessfully to have an abortion on finding herself pregnant in 1944.12Her uncertainty concerning the identity of Sweeney's father (of which Tucker was unaware) probably contributed to her dark mood at this time, as did the mundane tasks of domesticity after the birth.13 So how do we read Hester's use of 'nature' in Man and tree ? If we bring to the image our knowledge of the currency that German Expressionism then held, might we not think of the utopian vision of Dresden's Die Brücke artists, prior to the First World War?14When these German artists painted the nude in the landscape it signified the recuperative power of nature. We know that Hester and Tucker had copies of PeterThoene's book Modern German Art published in 1938, and Emile Waldmann's La Peinture Allemande Contemporaine of 193O.15The communal activity of Die Brücke might even have carried a resonance, given that Hester spent part of this period living outside Melbourne at Heide, where patrons John and Sunday Reed played hosts. But in Man and tree Hester does not present a utopian vision. Die Briicke's utopian dream had, after all, been crushed by two world wars. A fir tree might now imply the distant spectre of war in Europe. Hester refused to depict nature as a sign of patriotism or nationalism and the harshness of the image allows little possibility for it to be read as a sign of fecundity, of birth or rebirth. It appears more a sign of what is being lost. A comparable image by Hester of 1943-44 presents a harrowed man, unshaven, etched in broad strokes of ink and watercolour, naked shoulders set against a stretch of what appears to be water, bordered by a line of dark scrub or jungle, with handwritten text stating 'death will find me'.16Not only does Death will find me (private collection) bear some stylistic similarity to Man and tree, with a crudely drawn man's head set against a semblance of nature, it also expresses a comparable anguish — fear fills the eyes that stare out at us. Nature is not often represented in Hester's work. Under the influence of artists such as Vassilieff, Hester's earlier outdoor scenes had featured suburban streets alive with incident. In interior scenes, the figure is often metaphorically embraced by a high horizon line, and by the framing device of the skirting board, a gesture either of imprisonment or of security, and of heightened emotional intensity. This ambiguity is especially evident in Asylum 1949 (QAG), where the naked woman reclines neatly within the comer of the room, her linear form echoing its angle. The floor rises sharply so that its comer almost touches the top of the page, providing only a hint of the barred window at left.17 Hester had earlier broached the subject of mental illness in Mad girl, an oil painting of c.1941-43 (Reed Estate), while clearly there is a comparison with Tucker's The possessed 1942.18 Parallels between Tucker and Hester also extend to Tucker's interest in the 'primitive' and in a 'haptic' approach to art making. In late 1944, Tucker published a piece in Angry Penguins on the naive or 'primitive' Right Joy Hester Asylum 1949 Watercolour on paper 39.5x49cm Purchased 1998 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant and with assistance from the John Darnell Bequest Joy Hester Sleeping figure Brush and gouache and ink on cream wove paper 18.7 X 27.6cm Purchased 1979 Queensland Art Gallery 194 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965