Albert Tucker Max Dunn, poet

Albert Tucker was one of the Angry Penguins group of artists, whose fiercely modernist outlook sent shockwaves through the art establishment of 1940s Melbourne. Tucker’s often grim imagery depicts the devastation he experienced through the Great Depression and World War II. With no formal training, he studied reproductions of works by post-impressionist and expressionist artists in the city’s public library. During his army service, he created potent images of the physical and mental traumas he witnessed in patients at Victoria’s Heidelberg Military Hospital in 1942. Meeting esteemed psychiatrist Dr Reginald Ellery, Tucker began exploring the intersection between psychology and creativity.

As Tucker was an avid reader of the stream-of-consciousness poetry of TS Eliot, it was almost inevitable that he crossed paths with the poet Max Dunn (c1895–1963), an enigmatic figure in Australian literature. Dunn went by various names – most of them invented – and later became president of the Buddhist Society of Victoria. He self-published his Eliot-inspired poems in the 1940s to a largely bewildered public.

Tucker’s portrait of Dunn is now at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, on long-term loan from the Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation, with the title Portrait of Max Dunn. Originally, Dunn was misspelled Dunne by Tucker in the work’s title for the 1945 Archibald, in which the artist also exhibited a self-portrait.