Albert Tucker was one of Australia’s most distinctive and important artists of the twentieth century. Born in Melbourne at the onset of World War I, Tucker grew up in relative economic insecurity and navigated the Great Depression. In the early 1940s he was strongly affected by the horrors of World War II and began a painterly onslaught, depicting the ‘psycho-reality’ of wartime Melbourne. His representations of predatory, lascivious and brutal behaviour, defined by his own unique symbolism, underpinned his later urban imagery and the intensity of his religious narratives of the 1950s, as well as the destruction characteristic of his ensuing Australian outback paintings.
