John Anthony Tuckson

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Tony Tuckson in Albury , February 1950.

John Anthony "Tony" Tuckson , (* 18 January 1921 in Port Said , Egypt ; † 24. November 1973 in Wahroonga , New South Wales ) was an Australian painter of abstract expressionism and deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales .

Life

John Anthony Tuckson was the second child of William Tuckson, a Suez Canal pilot and hobby painter , and his wife Eléonore, nee Pegler. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, first Gresham's School in Holt (Norfolk) , then Christ's College in Finchley , a borough of London . He spent his holidays on the coast of the English Channel . After studying painting for two years at the Hornsey School of Art in London, he worked in a furniture store in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1939 and attended evening classes at the Kingston School of Art.

Members of the No. 54 Squadron at Richmond Airfield , 1942. Tony Tuckson is second from right.

Tuckson entered the Royal Air Force (RAF) on June 10, 1940 and completed pilot training in Edmonton, Canada . From May 1941 it was used in Supermarine Spitfires in Great Britain and Europe during World War II . His season No. 54 Squadron was transferred to Darwin , Australia in August 1942 , from where he flew missions against the Japanese armed forces . While on vacation in Sydney , he married on November 23, 1943 in St. James's Church of England from Turramurra Dorothea Margaret Bisset, a former design student and worker in an armaments factory. In one training session, he served as an instructor for pilots in Commonwealth Wirraway trainer aircraft.

Tony Tuckson and Hal Missingham viewing Pablo Picasso's Le Corsage Orange in preparation for the 1953 French Painting Today exhibition .

During the war he made numerous drawings. In 1945 he returned to London, where he was impressed by paintings by Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse , Paul Klees and Paul Cézanne . In Sydney, the RAF dismissed Tuckson on August 10, 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant . As part of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme , he studied for three years at East Sydney Technical College . Here he graduated from December 1949 and showed his work at the Society of Artists and the Contemporary Art Society of Australia . The National Art Gallery of New South Wales appointed him in October 1950 first as assistant to director Hal Missingham , then in 1957 as deputy director.

1949 Tuckson had been "blown away" by an exhibition in Sydney ( bowled ), a collection of anthropologists Ronald Berndt with Aboriginal art from Arnhem Land showed. He accompanied the orthopedic surgeon and patron of the arts Stuart Scougall on expeditions to Melville Island and Arnhem Land in 1958 and 1959 to collect art for the gallery. In June 1959, Tuckson installed a group of carved and painted Pukamani stakes (used to demarcate burial grounds) near the entrance to the gallery. He prepared a large exhibition of bark paintings, carved figures as well as sacred and secular objects of the Aborigines, which were shown as a traveling exhibition in all Australian state galleries from 1960 to 1961. This resulted in the book Australian Aboriginal Art (New York, 1964) edited by Berndt . Tuckson changed the Australian view of Aboriginal art, which was typically subject to ethnographic perception; it was only the exhibition that gave it the status of fine art .

Further curatorial innovations by Tuckson were in 1962 the addition of works of art by the Melanesians to the gallery's collection; In 1966 the exhibition Melanesian Art followed and in 1973 the collective exhibition Art of the Aborigines and Melanesians . After studying abroad from 1967 to 1968, Tuckson commissioned the architect Andrew Anderson to modernize and expand the dilapidated 19th century gallery building, which reopened in March 1972.

Tuckson exhibited only nine of his own pictures between 1954 and 1962. He described himself as a "Sunday painter". By 1958, the painter, based on the École de Paris , had created figure compositions, nudes , portraits and occasional still lifes , whereby the derived style obscured the artistic value of his work. Tuckson only painted at home; from May 1949 he lived in his house in Gordon and from 1962 in a new house in Wahroonga , both suburbs of Sydney.

In his first solo exhibition (1970) Tuckson showed 64 of his works from 1958 to 1965 at Watters Gallery , along with a new painting. His next and last exhibition with 22 new works took place in 1973. Tuckson's late abstract paintings were a kind of self-portrait that emphasized his inner, subjective world. He is considered one of the best abstract expressionists in Australia.

Tuckson suffered from cancer and died on November 24, 1973 in Wahroonga, whereupon he was cremated. He left behind his wife and son Michael. In 1976 , the Art Gallery of New South Wales organized a memorial exhibition in his honor . In 1989 Terence Maloon initiated an exhibition in Melbourne entitled Tuckson: Themes and Variation . His paintings are exhibited in the National Gallery of Australia in the capital Canberra in an international context.

Works (selection)

  • Two Faces , 1952
  • Seated Nude , 1952
  • Lovers
  • Red collage , 1960
  • Portrait of a Woman , 1950
  • Still Life with Dewar's Whiskey Jug No. 2 , 1948
  • Pig
  • Artist and model , 1954
  • Man with Straight Mouth , 1949
  • Women Standing No. 1 , 1952
  • White, over Red and Black , 1964
  • Figure with clasped hands
  • In My Kitchen
  • Red / Black / White No. 3 , 1965
  • Jug and Chianti bottle , 1949

literature

  • Daniel Thomas et al .: Tony Tuckson . Sydney 1989.
  • Terence Maloon: Tony Tuckson, Themes and Variations . Melbourne 1989.

Web links

Commons : Tony Tuckson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Tuckson, John Anthony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tuckson, Tony (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian painter and assistant director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Port Said , Egypt
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1973
Place of death Wahroonga , New South Wales