Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows scenes of a gallery displaying the artworks of Australian painter Tony Tuckson. These scenes are accompanied by lively classical music, and a narrator identifies defining elements of Tuckson’s painting style. This is followed by voice-over commentary by a friend or associate of Tuckson. This commentary is accompanied by black-and-white photographs of Tuckson and close-ups of his paintings.

Educational value points

• The life of a little-known but important Australian artist Tony Tuckson (1921–73) is celebrated in this clip. Tuckson, who called himself a 'Sunday painter’, held only two exhibitions in his lifetime. He did not hold his first solo exhibition until 1970, 3 years before his death. Prior to this, he was primarily known as a curator and arts administrator. While working as deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he promoted and mounted exhibitions of Indigenous Australian and Melanesian art. Tuckson produced more than 450 paintings in his lifetime and is now regarded as one of Australia’s finest abstract expressionists.

• The clip features examples of the work of Tony Tuckson from the abstract expressionist period of his artistic career. Tuckson experimented widely with artistic styles and visual language. Influenced by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as well as other European artists, his paintings from the early 1960s to the early 1970s show his interest in abstract expressionism. Tuckson’s interest in US abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Jackson Pollock, also influenced his work in this period, as did his admiration for and interest in Indigenous Australian and Melanesian art.

• Tuckson is an Australian artist who is sometimes known as an exponent of action painting, a style of painting in which paint is smeared, thrown, splashed or dribbled onto the canvas rather than being carefully applied. Action painting is associated with abstract expressionism and sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. US art critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term in 1952, saying that the canvas was 'an arena in which to act’. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning are two US artists associated with this style.

• Tuckson had a challenging personality and this is referred to in the clip. Born in 1921, he saw active service in the Second World War as a fighter pilot. Tim Fisher, the curator of one of his exhibitions describes him as a 'decisive, ethical, hard-painting, hard-drinking, “Craven A” smoking artist’ (www.nga.gov.au). Daniel Thomas, an art writer, said that Tuckson 'had been racing against death all his life’ (www.nga.gov.au). Tuckson maintained an intense painting program while fully employed as deputy director of the Art Gallery of NSW, fitting painting into his spare time.

• The clip is a segment from the film Tuckson (1988) by Australian filmmaker Curtis Levy. Levy’s first film, made in 1973, was about children’s theatre. In 2004 he made the controversial film The President versus David Hicks and in 2006 Hephzibah about the life of Yehudi Menuhin’s talented pianist sister.

Energetic and emphatic violin music plays as we survey the gallery with Tuckson’s paintings on the wall.

An associate of Tuckson The first impression you get from most of the paintings is that the main forms are absolutely spontaneous and are the result of a single perfected action, and that is a universal, timeless ambition for artists. Directness he certainly prized very much and action painting is the ultimate, riskiest kind of directness, this large-scale directness, big six, eight foot high panels with an action, a single brush mark. I presume what he understood action painting to be and what everyone was reading about Jackson Pollock, throwing paint. I do not think Tony threw it in the way that Pollock did, but at least a huge, relaxed brush mark is still action painting.

Birds chirp and horns play in the background.

A friend of Tuckson There was a whole extraordinary change happened in his appearance and the way he operated. He became with that great, long, shaggy hair, sort of, he really looked like a sort of mad Farmer Giles figure at stages. And there was that, a lot of that was to do with a sense of freedom, a sense that he really could break out of a mould, or it was time that there was something, this sort of unique Tuckson thing happening with him. He was somebody that I just liked and respected very, very much but he was an absolutely appallingly difficult man. He was bloody belligerent at times but it was always with this sort of passion that you felt that he really cared about things, and I found myself absolutely loving him as time went on.

Eccentric music and a clown’s horn play us out.