Allen Tucker SOLD

Curator's Comments: 

Tucker was born in Brooklyn in 1866 and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture. He took a job as an architectural draftsman in the firm of McIvaine and Tucker, his father's business. During that time, he studied painting at the Art Students League with Impressionist John H. Twachtman, but it was not until around 1904, when he was 38, that Tucker became a full-time painter, leaving architecture behind. Tucker developed his own unique American impressionist style, like Ryder and Stevens, and he took Fauvism as his starting point. However, he went further than the naif style, influenced chiefly by Van Gogh, and indeed he was called "the American Van Gogh." Maurice Prendergast is also credited as having an influence on Tucker's brushwork and compositions. However, as his painting evolved, Tucker achieved a unique artistry that did not fit into any tidy slot for description, and he was known as an individualist not easily categorized in American art history, though he is referenced in Gerdts. His modernist impulses led him to become, in 1911, a charter member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. And with this group, he helped conceive, organize, and select the artists for  the 1913 Armory Show, which shocked viewers by introducing cubism to America. Tucker exhibited in the Armory Show of 1913. Later, in 1919, he helped found the Society of Independent Artists, a group that extended the rebellion against traditionalism.

In 1918, Tucker had his first large one-man show at the Whitney Studio Club (later the Whitney Museum of American Art) and became an advisor to  Juliana Force, who directed the Whitney Studio and the Whitney Studio Club. He was an Honorary member of the Art Students' League, and taught at the League from 1921 to 1928. Contributing meaningfully to art criticism, Tucker  wrote "Design and Idea," published in 1930. His summers were spent painting in New Mexico, on the New England coast, in the Colorado and Canadian Rockies and in Europe. Allen Tucker died in New York City in 1939. Tucker has 14 pieces in the Smithsonian, 2 in the National Gallery, and 5 in New York's Metropolitan Museum. We are proud to offer his brilliant "Monhegan Headland." As some will recognize, the view here is the classic perspective on the Monhegan clifts and the famous Black Rock. We show three identical perspectives by Maine legends, Connaway, Woodbury and Ebert, all of whom took the same stance. Note also the white diagonal pinpoint striping, which is difficult to see in our image, and which we give another example of. This is Tucker's technique with rain.