(Lee) (b Melbourne, Dec 29, 1914; d Melbourne, Oct 23, 1999). Australian painter. Unable to study at the official art school owing to impoverished circumstances, he attended part-time classes at the Victorian Artists’ Society (1933–9) and studied briefly under George Bell. He survived by freelance illustration. His early portraits and street scenes show a tentative exploration of modernism. In 1938 he became a leading member of the group of artists and laymen, including George Bell, Sidney Nolan and John Reed, that established the Contemporary Art Society in Melbourne. From 1939 to 1942 Tucker explored the styles of the Neue Sachlichkeit artists George Grosz and Max Beckmann and became interested in Cubism and Surrealism. A number of his early themes and subjects derived from his interest in the writings of George Orwell and T. S. Eliot. Tucker was friendly with the European expatriate artists Danila Vassilieff and Josl Bergner. Their work helped him break through to more direct and expressive forms of painting, based on primitive and naive art but also on sophisticated European modernist sources. Tucker’s early sympathy for radical ideas had dissipated by ...