Albert Tucker AO (1914-1999) was one of the strongest Australian painters of last century. His expressionistic style of painting was formed during the wartime years, when the city of Melbourne took on a strange and unreal atmosphere. His first major series of paintings, collectively titled Images of Modern Evil, was painted between 1945 and 1947. Tucker lived in Europe and the United States throughout the 1950s. There he refined and extended his subjects, concentrating on Australian myths, which he saw as central to the definition of national identity. Although best known as a painter, Tucker was an enthusiastic photographer. He took many of the now-familiar photographs of Melbourne's artistic circles of the 1940s.