[3] Along with Heide Circle members such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, Tucker became associated with the Angry Penguins art movement, named after a publication founded by poet Max Harris and published by the Reeds.

In 1940, Tucker was called up for army service and spent most of his time working in Heidelberg Military Hospital drawing patients suffering from wounds and mental illnesses as a result of war.

He produced three important works at this stage, Man at Table, a pen and ink illustration of a man whose nose had been sliced off by a shell fragment, The Waste Land – the title drawn from T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land[7] – an image of death sitting on a stool watching and waiting, and Floating Figures, of two figures floating down a hall, a third with a demented smile.

[10] The Images of Modern Evil series was influenced by prostitution in Melbourne during World War II, which Tucker was repulsed by, and the Leonski murders[10] as well his more general perception of a moral collapse.

He produced a monochrome pen drawing called Hiroshima; it contains no figures, just the aftermath of the atomic bomb blast, with tents and shelters littering the landscape.

In 1954 he met Sidney Nolan in Rome, when he produced Apocalyptic Horse[12] and began painting Australia from memory.

He distorted stereotypes and icons of the Australian bush, including convicts, Burke and Wills and the Kelly Gang.

In 1959, Tucker won the Australian Women's Weekly Prize, which enabled him to spend two years in New York producing the Manhattan Series and Antipodean Heads.

It emerged many years later that Tucker was not the boy's biological father—it was probably Billy Hyde, an Australian jazz drummer with whom Hester had had a brief affair.

[15][16] His marriage broke down in 1947 and Tucker travelled to Japan and Europe, leading a bohemian life, painting, exhibiting and taking odd jobs.

[5] In his later years in the 1980s, and especially after the deaths of John and Sunday Reed, Tucker took on the task of recording the history of the artists circle he had known: ...the thing I became aware of was that there was no human face for that period.