Melbourne, Albert Tucker, tram, 1973, painting, night
Summary
A primary focus of the Art and Heritage Collection is artists' individual and differing understandings and depictions of Melbourne. On gifting this work to the City of Melbourne in 2006, Barbara Tucker, the late widow of eminent Australian 20th-century artist Albert Tucker (1914–99), said the artist considered himself 'a Melburnian first and an Australian second'. Indeed, the city appears in his work across the decades. His is a darkly contemplative conception of the metropolis – a psychological as much as physical place, represented as a source of anxiety and moral degeneracy.
Painted in 1973, 'Night Image 1' is just one work from the 1970s that revisits Tucker's 'Images of Modern Evil' series, made between 1943 and 1947 in response to the dramatic social upheavals wrought by World War II. In a bleak, nocturnal urban setting, the totemic figure of a sexualised woman – disaggregated eyes, grinning mouth, inflated breasts and feather-like phalanges – is the chief protagonist through which the artist signals moral decay in urban life. Looming from the darkness behind her, the no. 3 tram approaches, cementing the narrative's Melbourne location. Incidentally, this is a tram the artist would have regularly caught himself, travelling between his home in Malvern and the city.
