Australian Gothic

Image:Amazon.com

So I finally got my hands on a copy of Australian Gothic. A biography of the Artist, Albert Tucker by Janine Burke. And here's a couple of stand out paragraphs so far...

"In Australia between 1929 and 1938, no paintings took as their subject the poverty, despair, evictions, demonstrations and scenes of humiliations and suffering witnessed or experienced by nearly every Australian. It was simply not a subject for either modernist or academic appraisal. An art of outrage arose but it was the province of a small, politically active group whose work mainly appeared in transitory left wing publications. The cartoons, prints and watercolours of Jack Maughan, Noel Counihan, James Flett, Nutter Buzacott, Rembrandt McClintock and Herbert McClintock formed Melbourne's art of the Depression. The socialist artists of the early 30's might have preached only to the converted but they created a turbulent underground force that emerged, at the end of the decade, to challenge the art world. Tucker would deeply register their impact."(pg 46)

"Tucker adopted a central idea of Read's. 'Internal necessity is perhaps the key phrase of our time.' First flagged in Art Now, internal necessity was the individual and romantic impulse that motivated and compelled artistic production. To Tucker it was 'not only my own view but probably the view of all my peer group, that people did something out of an inner compulsion, an inner need and unless you had that inner compulsion or inner need, then its not worth doing. And you cant have some teacher from outside saying do this and do it this way." (pg 109)

Other stand out themes so far...

The Melbourne of the Depression era. Little Collins St and other inner city land marks where Tucker and other noted Australian modernists hung out and would have walked, talked, painted, brooded and squelched out their cigarette buts in the blue stone laneways that are now festooned with paste ups, stencils and graffitti. Tucker's mother was raised in Yarraville and around the Maribyrnong river. But she yearned for the "middle class" lifestyle of Malvern, where Tucker spent his boyhood. The other thing that strikes me, just like it did in the biography of Charles Schulz, was the loneliness and isolation experienced by Tucker in late adolescence and early adulthood.