White lines (horizontal) on black and pink

Born in Egypt to British parents and schooled in England, Tony Tuckson flew Spitfires over northern France during the Second World War, before being posted to Darwin in 1942. After the war, he immigrated to Australia, studying art at East Sydney Technical College between 1946 and 1949. His teachers included Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson, who were among Australia’s earliest abstractionists.

Tuckson received his first bark painting, collected for him by photographer Axel Poignant, in 1951, and made his first trip to Arnhem Land with his wife Margaret Tuckson and collector Dr Stuart Scougall in the late 1950s. By this time he was working at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, commissioning, collecting and exhibiting Aboriginal art, and painting surreptitiously. This work was made in the year of his premature death at the age of fifty-two. The immediacy of its mark-marking, with swathes of pigment on an unprimed surface, registered as a shock in the Australian art world at the time, with the art critic and painter James Gleeson stating in 1973: 
‘he shows the making of a painting with all the travail fully exposed, without prettification or pretence ... there is something almost shocking in the completeness of the exposure’.

Dr Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs