Joy Hester and friends

Largely unrecognised during her lifetime, and the only woman in the Angry Penguin circle, Joy Hester’s bold, intuitive and expressive drawings were respected and admired by her closest friends—who included Sunday and John Reed, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman. This publication traces her remarkable life story and personality, her marriage to Albert Tucker, and her struggle with Hodgkins disease through to her death at age 40, in 1960. It examines her work from her early student drawings, through the concentration-camp inspired images of the mid 1940s, to her more personal images of children and lovers from the 1950s—poetic distillations which, in Barbara Blackman’s words, portray ‘haunting faces of love, of loss, of longing’.