Deutscher and Hackett

A painting that took Australian modernism global when it was bought and exhibited by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1959 will go to auction in Melbourne this month – with only a five-figure estimate.

Albert Tucker’s Lunar landscape, painted in London in 1957 and inspired by photographs that fellow artist Sidney Nolan had shown him of drought-affected Queensland, was purchased by MoMA in 1959 and hung in its Recent Acquisitions exhibition, alongside such luminaries as Adolph Gottlieb and Jasper Johns.

“It was an amazing, serendipitous series of events that got the picture into MoMA’s collection, but it was still a monumental achievement,” said Damian Hackett, executive director of Deutscher and Hackett, which will auction the painting on August 27.

“It established Tucker as an international artist, not a quote-unquote Australian artist.”

A member of Melbourne’s influential Heide Circle art movement who developed his eye for unsettling imagery as a war artist, Tucker moved to Europe in 1947 after his wife left him.

The images of pain and anguish he saw in the religious works of Italian Renaissance masters resonated with him, especially the way they depicted wounds with layers of paint for an encrusted, grotesque effect.

After Nolan showed him the Queensland drought photos, which included the contorted forms of dead horses and the carcasses of cows hanging from trees, Tucker turned his attention to Australian landscapes and began building up his own canvases as a way, he said, of “unloading the demons”.

Introduced to the textural possibilities of polyvinyl acetate by Italian artist Alberto Burri, Tucker’s work increasingly featured pitted vistas and cratered forms.

“This is achieved to powerful effect in Lunar landscape, with its otherworldly purple sky providing a startling contrast to the almost violent lacerations that punctuate the land’s dark, pock-marked surface,” writes Kelly Gellatly in Deutscher and Hackett’s catalogue.

Tucker’s Californian girlfriend, Mary Dixon, thought enough of Lunar landscape to include it in a handful of his paintings she took to New York in 1958, placing them with the commercial Poindexter Gallery.

It was in the Poindexter’s stockroom that MoMa director Alfred J. Barr chanced upon the work.

“I saw this piece of insistent crudeness and recognised a master illusionist at work,” Barr later recalled.

“[It] put me immediately in mind of the art brut school in France where painters consciously defied good taste and restraint.”

Lunar landscape is believed to be only the second Australian modernist work acquired by MoMA. It had bought Nolan’s After Glenrowan Siege (Second Ned Kelly Series) in 1955.

MoMa still owns the Nolan but had decided to de-accession the Tucker, said Hackett, because the singular work had never been shown there since Recent Acquisitions in 1959. It has not been seen by the public at all since a two-month airing at National Gallery of Victoria in 1990.

“MoMa maintains about 200,000 works, of course, and they decided the best chance for Lunar landscape to be seen was to return it to Melbourne, where most of the market for Tucker’s paintings live,” Hackett said.

The New York institution still owns another Tucker, 1960’s Explorers, Burke and Wills, an oil-and-sand on canvas that Hackett said probably better represented the artist’s mostly figurative oeuvre than the more abstract Lunar landscape.

Hackett has placed a “reasonable, conservative” estimate of $60,000-$80,000 on Lunar landscape, in line with recent results for other works similar in size to its 96 centimetres tall by 131 centimetres wide.

However, Tucker, who died in 1999, got a major market fillip in 2017 when Image Of Modern Evil 29, one of his Picasso-inspired war paintings, fetched $1.159 million.

Given the historical significance of Lunar landscape, Hackett acknowledged the five-figure estimate may prove too conservative.

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