Luna Park 1987

ALBERT TUCKER (1914-1999)

Luna Park 1987

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
97.5 x 126.5 cm; 102.0 x 132.5 cm (framed)
signed and dated lower right: Tucker 87
signed and inscribed verso: For Barbara Tucker/ - Albert Tucker/ For Barbara/ Albert Tucker
inscribed on stretcher verso: LUNA PARK 80036/ 96.5/ 127/ cm

Provenance:
Gift from the artist, Barbara Tucker, Melbourne
Sotheby's Australia, 2010 [private sale]
Private collection, Sydney
Acquired from the above, company collection, Sydney, 2018
Private collection, New South Wales

Exhibited:
Albert Tucker: The Mythologies & Images, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 26 June - 13 July 1990; Savill Galleries, Sydney, 1-18 August 1990, cat.79 (illus. exhibition catalogue, p.58)
Albert Tucker: Images of Modern Evil, The Australian Club, Melbourne, 6 July - 1 October 2010, cat.2

Reference:
Fry, G., Albert Tucker, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, p.212 (illus.)
The Australian Club Exhibitions and Selected Works from the Collection: Volume 2, The Australian Club, Melbourne, 2014, p.126 (illus.)

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Geoffrey Smith, Chairman, Smith & Singer, with cataloguing this work

Estimate: $180000 - 240000

Result Hammer: $180000

You had this feeling of the dark shadows of the sexual context of all of St Kilda Road, right down to St Kilda and from Princes Bridge — the GI thing, the Digger thing, the schoolgirl tart thing, the victory girls. This was all feeding me at the time.(1)

Melbourne of the late 1930s and 40s appeared to some close observers as an increasingly morally bereft place. Albert Tucker, 25 years old when World War II broke out in Europe, was an emerging artist well versed in T.S. Eliot’s imagined industrial wasteland and other end-of-civilisation literary tropes, as well as conditioned by a robust strand of, as he fondly referred to it, ‘Edwardian puritanism’. He too found, and positioned, the city and its environs as socially repugnant and symptomatic of a sharp decline in Western civilisation and its values.

Tucker had risen quickly to become a central and vocal figure in Melbourne’s contemporary art scene. A member of the Heide Circle of artists, intellectuals and writers centred around art patrons John and Sunday Reed, he became embroiled in debates on the current state of art and its direction. To help frame his response to the surrounding unruliness, Tucker developed a dualistic philosophy – good/evil, conservative/radical, puritanical/free-thinking and hermetic artist/social commentator – accompanied by a highly idiosyncratic visual language. In this way, the dark days and nights of wartime Melbourne transformed Albert Tucker’s thoughts and practice. This philosophy helped him and other like-minded artists try to make changes by rebelling against the more traditional representations of the urban landscape and in the process revolutionise the course of Australian art.

St Kilda’s history as an attractive seaside resort to which Melburnians flocked has as its counterpoint a less salubrious underbelly. Its heyday of holidaymakers basking in the sun and cooling off at the beach, frequenting fun attractions such as Luna Park and St Moritz ice-skating rink or eating and drinking at beachside hotels and cafés co-existed with sex work, alcoholism and crime. For Tucker, the suburb became the locus of both intense excitement and an indicator of lax morals that he felt had beset wartime Melbourne.

Luna Park 1945, from the Heide Museum of Modern Art collection, is one of Albert Tucker’s earliest and best depictions of the popular St Kilda landmark and of this dualistic thesis. The funfair conveys the gaudy magic of night – exciting, full of activity, burlesque-like. Exaggerated forms, garish colours and bright lights animate the scene, creating a push–pull effect that gives the viewer the feeling of being in the fun park itself. The painting also draws upon other observations of St Kilda life: the severe representation of the female form and its reduction to basic elements is likely a response to the relaxation of laws around nude-bathing in St Kilda that had been brought in during the war years; the splayed star and/or jellyfish, which he would have seen on beach. These charged representations of changing sexual practice and perspectives represent a very personal view of the body, complete with all-seeing bulbous eyes and lurid, crescent-shaped lips: ‘the crescent seemed to embody the virulent and primal sexuality which had been released in the blackout’.(2) These three elements – body, eyes, lips – became central to Tucker’s celebrated ‘Images of Modern Evil’ series of 1943-46 and integral to the ways he manipulated the female form to connote the confluence of hedonism and a more sinister feeling of personal unease.(3)

Luna Park 1987, in contrast, is from a much later, though similarly productive period. The artist returned to the city in 1979 after fifteen years spent in relative seclusion with his second wife, Barbara, at their Hurstbridge bush property. Significantly, the Tuckers moved to the very place that had inspired much of Tucker’s early art, including ‘Images of Modern Evil’. Tucker’s new home and studio were located in an old Victorian mansion, ‘Woodside’, opposite the St Kilda Botanical Gardens. This location reinforced the artist’s identification of and disdain for St Kilda’s seedy side as he again witnessed soliciting, drunkenness and disorder. Yet he conveyed his excitement for his return to the city through successfully reworking earlier ideas and motifs into a new and highly accomplished body of work.

Like its earlier iteration, Luna Park 1987 reveals an ongoing interest in Pablo Picasso’s fragmented bodily forms and the Surrealist investment in the uncanny and carnivalesque – in something frightening yet familiar. The work also gives insight into the artist’s long-standing personal interests in Expressionist film, seen especially in the fabulous deep-mauve shadows, vaudeville theatre and other popular forms of public entertainment. Compositionally, the artwork bears a strong visual resemblance to Figures on a Beach, a 1978 gouache and pastel on cardboard from Heide Museum of Modern Art. A comparison can also be made between this work and a follow-up series of portraits of friends and other artists placed against the recognisable backdrop of St Kilda Beach and Port Phillip Bay.

In Luna Park, two naked female figures float against a festive backdrop of surf, sea and sun. One is rendered with bright pink lipstick, full breasts and attractive flesh tones; the other is scorched to the colour of a boiled lobster. Tucker, it seems, sees her as a victim of her own hedonistic excess. The artist also reaches back to the wartime origins of the image, placing immediately behind the figures the timber scaffolding of Luna Park’s Great Scenic Railway and the familiar cabs. The red, blue and white striped skirts of the so-called Victory Girls – and their implied lascivious behaviour – are referenced through the large towel (or cloth wind-break) and beyond that through the positioning of a smaller seated figure to the painting’s right. Although this smaller figure appears to be female, the posture and placement of her form, along with the presence of a green crescent, refer more obliquely to the khaki-wearing, seated, drunk Australian soldier of wartime Melbourne. Tucker also gave this motif a renewed focus in a work painted the same year as Luna Park, A.W.O.L. 1987.

Albert Tucker often alluded to the 1980s series that included works such as Luna Park and A.W.O.L. as constituting some of the finest he had completed. These artworks show the full evolution of his creative impulse, correspondence between images and development of stark, primordial protoplasmic forms. In this intriguing and important 1980s painting, Luna Park, the fun many associate with the beach and the fairground is underpinned by Tucker’s personal belief in the shortcomings of society and the need for the artist to develop a form of art of its time and place.

Footnotes:

1. Albert Tucker interviewed by James Gleeson, 2 May 1979, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, accessed October 2024: https://nga.gov.au/media/dd/documents/tucker.pdf  Also quoted at greater length in Mollison, J. & Bonham, N., Albert Tucker, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1982, p.37

2. Albert Tucker, quoted in Mollison, J. & Bonham, N., op. cit., p.38

3. For an alternative view on the Victory Girls and the place of moral outrage within Tucker’s art, see McAuliffe, C., ‘Footloose Fillies and Pretentious Penguins: “Victory Girls”, Modern Evil and the Politics of the Melbourne Art World,’ in Harding, L. (ed.), Albert Tucker: Images of Modern Evil, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, 2011, pp.26-33

Rodney James

Rodney James is an independent art consultant who specialises in valuations, collection management, exhibitions, research and writing, and strategic planning for art galleries and museums.

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