Australian
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Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows scenes illustrating the life and art of Joy Hester. Her first husband, artist Albert Tucker, shows and describes examples of her work that include ink-and-wash sketches of the young Tucker and their son, Sweeney. This is intercut with black-and-white photographs of the artists and writers Hester associated with in her youth. An unidentified interviewee names some of the members of the Contemporary Arts Society, including writer and poet Max Harris who published a literary magazine called Angry Penguins. The clip is accompanied by a jazz track by Paul Gabrowsky.

Educational value points

• Joy Hester (1920–60) is now considered to be one of the most significant Australian artists of the 1940s and 1950s, although she held only three solo exhibitions during her lifetime and did not receive critical acclaim until the time of her death. In 1941 she married the artist Albert Tucker with whom she had a son, Sweeney. While Tucker was overseas in 1947 she had an affair with the artist Gray Smith. She left Tucker and her son, moved to Sydney and married Smith in 1959. Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease in 1947, she continued to write and paint until her death in 1960.

• Hester preferred the medium of brush and ink over paint and most of the works shown in the clip are line drawings using Chinese ink and wash. At a time when her more celebrated contemporaries favoured painting, the intimate style of Hester’s drawings may have contributed to the lack of recognition her work received during her life. Since the 1980s Hester’s work and life have been the subjects of books and major exhibitions that have sought to reappraise her position in Australian art history.

• The Angry Penguins was a modernist literary and artistic movement, named after the magazine Angry Penguins published in 1940 in Adelaide by four poets, including Max Harris. The painters and writers in Angry Penguins sought to challenge what they saw as the conservative trends in the art and literary establishment in the early 1940s in Australia. Joy Hester and Albert Tucker were members of the Angry Penguins painting group, which also included Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and John Perceval.

• The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) was an important institution established in Melbourne in 1938 by the artist and teacher George Bell in protest against the conservatism of the Australian Academy of Art. Its main objective was to foster and promote contemporary art. John Reed, a notable patron of artists in Melbourne, was elected CAS president in 1940, and members included Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan. In 1956 Reed established the Gallery of Contemporary Art, later to become the Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, as the head office of CAS.

• Albert Tucker (1914–99) has been called a pivotal artist in the development of Australian Expressionism. The son of a railway worker, Tucker left school at 14 and was largely self-taught in art. He was strongly influenced by the Surrealist and Expressionist painters of the 1940s. Tucker’s work is recognised for its confronting representation of a society that he frequently felt morally at odds with. Tucker married Joy Hester in 1941, and after her death was instrumental in encouraging recognition of her as a significant artist.

• The clip demonstrates a particular documentary style of biography. Writer and director Claire Jager uses a mix of interviews, voice-overs, still photographs, paintings, and a jazz track by Paul Gabrowsky. The style of using successive images and voices is perhaps designed to contribute to a sense of a 'stream of consciousness’, which was one aspect of Hester’s painting style. Visuals of Hester’s work illustrate the commentary about her life and creative impulses.

This clip starts approximately 9 minutes into the documentary.

A selection of Joy Hester’s portraits in ink and brush appear in close-up detail. Albert Tucker is standing at a work bench in a dark artist’s workshop and is sifting through a variety of Joy’s works.
Albert Tucker Well, these are some of the drawings here that are the surviving ones of Joy’s. There are a few here. See these ones. You get this, an ample, spontaneous, overall pattern, design which at the same time is a curlicue – a linear design which is done almost in a moment and we see here you’ve got the breasts, and you’ve got the stomach, and you’ve got the legs there, which are all transformed into a two-dimensional area, and ah, what’s here, and, oh yes, and here’s one here that’s quite interesting, a little one of Sweeney… in his cot presumably. This is a very free and expansive line that she had on the back of a Contemporary Arts Society invitation card. It’s got one little interesting little abstract that I haven’t quite worked out. It’s a cage figure.

A hand-held shot takes us through an ivy-encased courtyard and stops at a tunnel that leads through to a door behind which is a sunlit garden. This cross fades into a series of photographs featuring members of the Angry Penguins in various social settings and ends with one of their works. A slow tempo jazz tune can be heard behind the narration.
Narrator The Contemporary Arts Society was a whole brave new world getting its show on the road. It included of course mainly painters like young Sydney Nolan, the young Albert Tucker, the young Arthur Boyd, but also there was this magazine editor in Perth, Max Harris, who in fact coined the phrase which has characterised the whole period – ‘Angry Penguins’. These were young people of all kinds of persuasion and impulse joined together to create a brave new world here in Australia, and Joy was swept into this.