Painting also known as No.49 c1964

Tony Tuckson (1921-1973)

Painting also known as No.49 c1964

synthetic polymer paint on board
122.0 x 91.5 cm
bears inscription verso beneath frame: Margaret Tuckson/ Joa[illeg.] A[illeg.]/ May 1974/ Hogarth/ Artists for Whitlam./ $200/ Tuckson (Watters 1970) No 49

Provenance:
Watters Gallery, Sydney, c1970
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, c1987
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher + Hackett, Sydney, 29 November 2007, lot 5
Private collection, Melbourne
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2010 (stock no.12320)
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Tony Tuckson, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 27 May - 13 June 1970, cat.49
Artists for Whitlam, Hogarth Galleries, Sydney, May 1974 (as No. 49)
Australian and Australia-Related Art: 1830s-1970s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 25 November - 11 December 1987, cat.150
Blue Chip XII: The Collectors' Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2 March - 2 April 2010, cat.6 (label attached verso)

SOLD

Tony Tuckson arrived at his compelling versions of abstraction after years spent in private investigations of line, colour and form through figuration. It was time well spent, as his later definitive abstract expressionist work evolved from those early years spent quietly exploring European modernist pictorial idioms through abstracted representations of domestic interiors, still life and the figure. These familiar and accessible subjects would succumb to his abstracting impulses, and abstraction’s pictorial vocabulary, by the mid-1950s.

By the end of that decade, Tuckson was producing so-called ‘scribbly, graffiti paintings’(1) regarded as his first sustained series of abstract expressionist works. They were followed by a period from around 1961 to 1965, when Tuckson was working on a series of red, black and white acrylic paintings on thin hardboard - rather than oil on canvas, paper or newsprint. Considered to be ‘amongst his best and toughest paintings’,(2) this pivotal series coincided with Tuckson’s changed domestic circumstances when he and his wife Margaret moved in October 1962 to their new home in Sydney’s Wahroonga, with a large studio. That shift of residence seemed to unleash and embolden Tuckson’s tireless creative energies, contained but increasingly evident in his previous work, both figurative and abstract.

Painting (also known as No.49 (Dark)) c1964 is vividly representative of the tri-colour series, distinctive for its tumultuous visual presence and urgent layered brushwork. Yet the abstract red and black paint descriptions, jostling over white ground, appear to coalesce and uncover a vestigial facial form, likely the artist’s, suggesting an intriguing ambiguity contained within the work. That this painting was selected by the artist and Watters Gallery for Tuckson’s first solo exhibition there in 1970, confers it with particular status; there would be only one other solo show in his lifetime.

Tuckson’s passage to abstraction was anticipated initially by his post-war art school training at East Sydney Technical College, where his most influential teachers were the renowned abstract artists Grace Crowley (1890-1979) and Ralph Balson (1890-1964).(3) His encounter in 1949 with an exhibition of Aboriginal bark paintings Arnhem Land Art at David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney set up his groundbreaking engagement with Aboriginal art over the next two decades, both as an artist and as an art gallery professional.

This other parallel public role of Tuckson, scrupulously separated from his private artist’s life, began in 1950 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), rising by 1957 to Deputy Director, a position he held with distinction until his premature death in 1973.(4)

Working at the AGNSW also provided Tuckson with first-hand experience of contemporary international art in important touring exhibitions, such as French Painting Today (1953) and Eight American Artists (1958). Experiencing the work of such abstractionists as Pierre Soulages (1919–2022) and Mark Tobey (1890–1976), proved influential to Tuckson’s steady progression towards boldly expressive, intuitively orchestrated abstraction. But it was the apparent casual directness of Indigenous art, its felt tracing of human hand and heart, that made a lasting impression on Tuckson and chimed with his early appreciation of the ‘active’ line present in paintings by Paul Klee (1879-1940).

While Tuckson’s later paintings seem infused with the immediacy of Indigenous art’s markings, he achieved that sense of compulsive spontaneous composition through his attuned manipulation of competing pictorial parts, cohering their haptic energies to an impassioned whole. After viewing Tuckson’s final 1973 exhibition, the artist critic James Gleeson concluded, ‘His pictures are about what it feels like to paint a picture’.(5)

FOOTNOTES

(1) Described as such by Thomas, D., ‘Introduction’, in Tony Tuckson, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1976, p.13
(2) Legge G., ‘Foreword’ in Legge, G. et al, Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989 (revised edition 2006), p.9
(3) Tuckson returned to Sydney from London in 1946 after active war service overseas as a Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot, posted to Darwin in 1942
(4) Tuckson collected, and was the first curator to display Aboriginal art for its aesthetic, rather than ethnographical significance, with his 1960 Australian Aboriginal Art touring exhibition.
(5) Gleeson G., ‘The Travail of Painting’, Sun-Herald, Sydney, 22 April, 1973, quoted in Thomas D., op. cit., p.17 

Jenepher Duncan

Jenepher Duncan is an independent art consultant. She was previously Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and Director of the Monash University Museum of Art and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

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