Albert Tucker’s visit to the Hiroshima blast zone marked a turn in his creativity. Travelling as a press correspondent via US Military Transport, the Australian artist went to Japan in early 1947 intending to make illustrations to sell to the media. Alan McCulloch, the art critic and graphics editor for a weekly magazine, who had used the artist as a cartoonist, promised to buy drawings.[1] But high in Tucker’s mind was the opportunity to gather material for his own modernist compositions. In travelling through several theatres of war, and seeing Japan at first hand, especially the atomic destruction at Hiroshima,…