Australian Biography - Albert Tucker

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Tucker

Tucker sync: Every experience in this life feeds into one's painting.

Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: Death is as much a part of life as being alive; suffering is as much

Detail. Tucker painting

a part of life as, and torment are as part of it as

Tucker sync: joy and happiness and fulfilment and there's no one escapes it.

Detail Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: As Don said we are all our own executioners and our own tormentors.

Tucker

Tucker sync: If you track something that's wrong, when you track it back you finish up right in there.

2 Photos of Tucker

Super:
Albert Tucker Born 1914
Artist

Music

Tucker

Tucker sync: My parents, they were two very good people I would say, but they were both -- my father was the son of my namesake, the honourable Albert Lee Tucker MLA, three times Mayor of Fitzroy. So he was the notable figure in my background, but he died long before I was born, and when he died he left quite a bit of property. He became a wealthy man, and this was split up with a very large family of a dozen children of which my father was one and even that amounted to fair bit of money. So my father

Photo. Tucker's parents

Tucker v/o: bought a house in East Malvern. I remember then my mother had aspirations, had to get into a middle class suburb,

Tucker

Tucker sync: which she did. So this had the peculiar effect, I think, of what

Photo. Tucker as boy with dog and family

I would say declassing me. I got the advantages of a middle class background,

Tucker

Tucker sync: but on the other hand I got the awful anxiety and tension of not enough money to sustain that lifestyle. And so my mother was endlessly in debt. Everything was on hire purchase, everything was in debt, the house was finally mortgaged.

Photo. Tucker with mother and siblings in yard

Tucker v/o: We had to leave there, and from then on we rented.

Interviewer o/s: You said that you felt fear through

Tucker

your childhood and a great anxiety, what was it do you think that produced that? You had these difficult....

Tucker sync: Debt collectors coming to the door and instalment collectors and my mother saying, "Quick, hide in case he looks through the window." So we'd, all the kids, we'd all have to hide under the table in case whoever it was, the policeman or the bluey or the instalment collector or the baker or the gas man or the electric light man and so on. I lived in absolute terror of these people. And today, I still go and have a pang of terror whenever I go to the letterbox and see it full of letters.

Photo. Tucker with mother and siblings

Interviewer o/s: Was there anything else, apart from the debt collectors, that you recall particularly terrifying

Tucker

you?

Tucker sync: Yes, yes there are a couple of very hairy final type experiences, which occurred at different times.

Detail. Photo. Tucker's brother

Tucker v/o: One of these was when my brother contracted meningitis

Tucker

Tucker sync: and one morning I was awake and I was seventeen at the time, I was wakened at three o'clock in the morning, my mother coming in and crying out "He's going! He's going!" I raced into the bedroom, into the other bedroom where my brother was and put my hand on his chest and I just felt his heart go [clicks fingers]. It was still; that was the end of it. My parents, of course, were shattered. Needless to say so was I but this is where the man of the family situation arose and I was called on to play this role, because my father was pretty well helpless and probably shock, shattered, and couldn't cope, my mother there was hysterical, couldn't cope, beside themselves and we were left there at three o'clock in the morning with my dead brother lying in bed.

Photo. Tucker as boy smiling

Interviewer o/s: So later, when you encountered

Tucker

images of suffering, these experiences that were personal to you....

Tucker sync: Oh, they come into it, they spread out and I think they're enormously valuable experiences, because they enable one's empathic imaginative faculties, they give it full reign.

Photo. Tucker as young man

Interviewer o/s: During your late adolescence, you were experiencing this encounter with death, pain and suffering.

Tucker

Were you also doing the more traditional things of discovering love and sex?

Tucker sync: Well let's see, that was happening of course

Photo. Joy Hester lying on ground with dogs

Tucker v/o: with Joy Hester. I was about six years older than her and she was seventeen. The thing with Joy

Tucker

Tucker sync: I think very, very quickly she saw that I was, I had something of -- see beneath her apparent ordinary exterior Joy, as I subsequently found,

Photo. Joy Hester

Tucker v/o: was a terribly ambitious girl which I would never have picked at that time and

Tucker

Tucker sync: I didn't really pick it until later on. I realise that there was a very quiet but powerful ego and a terrific ambition at work, which I miscalculated all the way, which is one thing there, which put me in the wrong position as it were. But anyhow, she I think immediately recognised in me

Photo. Tucker in studio

Tucker v/o that I was a direction to go in which would be of value to her, which it was.

Tucker

Tucker sync: I introduced her to people like Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, John and Sunday Reed, all these people and it opened up a totally new world for her that she

Photo. Joy Hester

never knew existed.

Interviewer o/s: And what did you see in her? You didn't see her ambition?

Tucker

Tucker sync: Oh she was a lovely girl, a very pretty girl and then after the relationship I realised a highly talented one. And there it was,

Photo. Tucker with baby Sweeney

Tucker v/o: and also we had a child, we had Sweeney, and so as far as I was concerned it was --

Tucker

Tucker sync: everything was all right in that sense. And I was taking the conventional view, but the thing I didn't realise that

Photo. Joy Hester and baby Sweeney in bed

Tucker v/o: the last thing Joy wanted was motherhood.

Interviewer o/s: How did you meet John

Tucker

and Sunday Reed?

Tucker sync: I met them very, very early, around 1937 or '38

Photo. John and Sunday Reed

Tucker v/o: I think. They were well to do people, from a wealthy background.

Tucker. Slow zoom out to MCU

Tucker sync: They both had overseas educations, and so in this sense they were more sophisticated than the average run of Australians that I'd encountered anyhow, including myself. And they were seen to be people more out of an Agatha Christie novel rather than real people in one sense. But the advantage they had is that once they left Europe, I think this was around 1934 I think, they'd reached one firm resolve that they wanted whatever they had and had to give in life, that they wanted to put it behind developing an indigenous Australian culture as fully as they could, or assist it to come into being as well as they could. And fortunately Sunday had a very good sensitive eye to these things, and then they got mixed up with Max Harris and he was very good on the literary end of it and another people dealt with the musical end of it and as of course people like Nolan, myself, Perceval who were dealt with the, you could say, the visual end of it. And this all just simply came together quite involuntarily without any plots or plans or whatever, but Sunday I would say was the magnetic centre of this that drew all these

Photo. Sunday Reed

Tucker v/o: elements together and then held them together.

Interviewer o/s: Why was it Sunday and not John?

Tucker

Tucker sync: Well Sunday -- John knew nothing about contemporary art, but he was married to Sunday and he was more the, he was a lawyer

Photo. John Reed

Tucker v/o: professionally and he was the man of action, the professional man,

Tucker

Tucker sync: and he was the one who -- in a sense Sunday was the poor little rich girl on one side, on the negative side and John was able to protect her from life and to able to carry out her ambitions for her or create the situation for it. And so he went along with, you could say, her directives just

Photo. Tucker, Joy Hester, John and Sunday Reed and Sweeney

Tucker v/o: about all the way and they were, when I met them there they'd already

Tucker

Tucker sync: pretty well committed themselves to this course and they were keeping their eye open for people they felt who would more or less help realise this ambition of theirs and I just happened to be one of them. And Nolan of course was the other one, he was the main one because to that he also developed, shall I say, a situation with Sunday where it developed an extra dimension, shall I say and this,

Photo. Tucker, Sunday and Nolan [?]

Tucker v/o: and so Nolan finished up going out to live there and he lived there for seven years.

Tucker

Tucker sync: Whereas I came in on the other aspect of John involving with the contemporary art

'Angry Penguins' Drawing

Tucker v/o: society and with Angry Penguins when he started publishing that and all the events that took place

'Angry Penguins' Cover

around that and I actually worked with Angry Penguins and this is how I earned my stipend, as it were. With hindsight,

Tucker

Tucker sync: we appeared as a group, in fact at the time we weren't, we were a willy-nilly coincidental arrangement

Photo. Tucker and others outdoors

Tucker v/o: relationships develop and sustain themselves over a time, and then you're seen together

Photo. Bergner
Super: Yosl Bergner

and you're mixed up and then finally you're designated by

Photo. Vassilieff

Super: Danila Vassilieff

other people as some kind of group, and then later on we became

Photo. Tucker

Dissolve to:

the Angry Penguin painters, which of course we knew nothing about at the time.

Music

Tucker painting

Detail of painting

Painting

Painting

Painting

Painting

Detail of painting

Tucker v/o: The great events of my life of course or shall I say the trauma producing events were the Depression

Tucker painting

and being put in the army. I was fortunate, very fortunate in the

Tucker

Tucker sync: sense that I never went off, I wasn't sent out and I didn't get involved in any warfare, but the thing that happened was that I was sent

Photo. Tucker in uniform

Tucker v/o: to Heidelberg, I was in the hospital for five weeks in all as it turned out

Tucker

Tucker sync: and I was there put in a, one of the units where they had a general grab bag unit with all sorts of people in it. And all I was doing was wandering around all day. Then all sorts of, again these shall I say experiences on another level of life, of revelatory experiences then happened. All the things that happened there were rather terrifying, because you became a witness for it. You'd see vans come in at midnight and they'd unload soldiers out, all of whom would be often half cuckoo and under armed guard, because they'd attacked their officers or attacked someone else and they were all, you know, a bit over the edge.

Tucker drawing of man. Fast zoom in t ECU man's eyes

Tucker v/o: And we had a lot of troops, a lot of them in the mental ward and in other wards whose nervous systems were

Tucker

Tucker sync: shot to pieces. They'd, the ones who'd covered the British withdrawal from Greece, they used Australian troops there, they were bombed to smithereens,

Detail of Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: and a lot of them came out of it completely gaga, you know, their nervous systems shattered. Either they'd have all sorts of

Tucker

Tucker sync: things there pulsing around in their necks and on them, or they're like that all the time and I remember one who was in a bed opposite me there, that when he'd get up in the night to go to the toilet and then he'd stagger to my bed and grab hold of it and he'd shake like mad and he'd nearly shake me out of bed, he couldn't control his shaking. Then he'd have that rest and get onto the toilet and then the same thing on the way back. You'd get all these sort of things. Then another fellow sitting in a bed opposite me, I remember he was just sitting, , hands like this looking into space, then he had a nerve in his neck that was going like that. This sent me cuckoo just looking at it.

Tucker painting

Dissolve to:

Interviewer o/s: These were extraordinary images...

Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: Oh, they gave me images that I've fed on all my life. They appeared all

Tucker painting

later on because it was when I came out I got another shock.

Tucker

Tucker sync: It was in this period of the brown out and when I came back into civilian life and this time there a kind of lifestyle of its own had developed and all the prostitutes had come out and they were all these schoolgirl ones putting on, they'd rush home from school in their school uniform, innocent looking little virgins and they'd trot home there and put on flags as mini, kind of mini skirts.

Detail of Tucker's prostitute painting

Tucker v/o: See mini skirts were invented then. But the thing that shocked me was the image that emerged not only of the

Tucker

Tucker sync: brutality-- because in this I'm talking about the male, the street was full of drunks

Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: and on the female end of it, of course, it was the prostitution

Painting. Detail of previous

sexual end of it. And this

Tucker painting

all produced, that all combined in producing an image, an emblem which

Tucker

Tucker sync: emerged out of it. I don't know why it became a compulsion with me. It became known as the 'crescent form'

Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: and so this was quickly associated with the painted lips of the prostitute and then I added

Tucker painting

to that a kind of polypsis [sic] sort of form

Tucker

Tucker sync: and played around with that and fitted the crescent onto it and then a stem with a single eyeball on the end of that,

Detail of Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: and lo and behind I had a, some little gremlin, you could say, a sexual gremlin, which was haunting us all. So this was

Detail of Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: an image that was thoroughly implanted in me and which I

Tucker painting

couldn't get away from it, in fact to such an extent that I found I couldn't paint without it.

Tucker

Interviewer o/s: What was the next major event for you in your development?

Tucker sync: Oh for me, well the major event for me was that when I went to Japan in

Photo. Joy Hester

Tucker v/o: '47 and when I got back all was well with my wife, with Joy.

Tucker

Tucker sync: We had a young son and he was two years old, young Sweeney, and when I returned I was confronted almost immediately with a, with one of those ludicrous, when I look back on it, utterly ludicrous, stranger then fiction situations that if you wrote about it in a novel no one would believe it.

Photo. John Reed

Tucker v/o: I received a call from John Reed, who was still in his office in Temple Court,

Tucker

Tucker sync: and so I went in and saw John and I remember he was sitting across the desk and looked at me very gravely and he said "I have unfortunately, I have some very bad news for you," and I said "Yes, what's that?" He said "You remember that Joy had this lump on her neck just before you went you away and you suggested to her that she see a doctor," before I went, which I did. We put it down to a virus or throat infection of some sort and I told her this before I went, you know, "See John and ask him if you could see his doctor and get him to look at it." And he said, anyhow, that Joy went and saw this doctor of John's

Photo. Joy Hester

Tucker v/o: and he then said she had Hodgkin's Disease and he then said that he estimated that she had about two years to live.

Tucker

Tucker sync: And this was a shocking, but of course this shocked, as you can imagine, you know I was sort of, it stopped in my tracks. I was utterly shocked out of my wits by this and, you know, I was like, see I'd come into the city with Joy and Sweeney in his stroller and she'd gone off to do some window shopping while I went up to see John and when I came down there I had this terrifying thing of composing myself and trying to talk to her and continue with her as though nothing had happened.

Photo. Joy Hester

Interviewer o/s: Because she didn't know?

Tucker v/o: She didn't know a thing about it. Didn't know a thing. But anyhow,

Tucker

Tucker sync: I did the best I could, and saw Joy and put on as good as front as I can when inside I was all churned up and in, you know, horror and despair and everything else. And we went home and we got home there -- and Joy had been very, a bit cranky and a bit difficult and I didn't pay much attention to this, because normally she was fairly stable -- and we got home, went up the stairs, and all of a sudden she burst out, she'd been saving it up apparently there, she said that she couldn't stay, that she had to go away on her own for a while to think things over, that she was involved with a so and so.

Interviewer o/s: Another man?

Tucker sync: Another man, yes. So there I was, you see, double whammy.

Photo. Joy Hester

Tucker v/o: Double whammy. All within the same couple of hours as it were.

Tucker

Tucker sync: So anyhow from then on it was a very scrambled and mixed thing. I spent the next days trying to track Joy down to find out what it was because obviously even accepting the fact of it, there were still all sorts of things to fix up. Sweeney for example, the youngster. I mean there I was left flat footed, but later on though I found out what, or at least I can only assume or worked out what would have really happened, is that Sunday would have given her an assurance that she'd look after

Photo. Sunday Reed holding Sweeney

Tucker v/o: Sweeney if she decided to go off. So this literally freed Joy to take off. And

Tucker

Tucker sync: I thought 'well this is it, I've got to get out of this place, this is hell, this will destroy, it's destroying me' and I had this, always had this European

Photo. Tucker

Tucker v/o: dream, I had that total desperation, I'll have to, I'll see Paris and die if necessary.

Music

Photo. Tucker in front of bell tower

Tucker v/o: I spent in all about four years in Paris, a

Photo. Tucker and others in cafe

broken period because I went also into Germany and back to England

Photo. Tucker looking at statues

a couple of times. It was an anxiety-ridden period,

Tucker

Tucker sync: but at the same time in memory it's a curiously colour and atmosphere and tactile quality of the whole thing, is that one of the richest periods of my life which I wouldn't give away for anything. And the curious thing about it is that I wasn't registering it so much while I was experiencing it, but it was after it was all over I picked it all up through osmosis you see,

Photo. Tucker sitting at table in front of small caravan

Tucker v/o: soaking it up while I was there or a great deal of it and then

Photo. Tucker

looking back on it there it was a marvellous experience and it still is

Photo. Tucker painting picture

Tucker v/o: to do that. And then later on I, while I was in Paris,

Tucker sync: I met an American girl, a girl I'll call her Mary which was her first name

Photo. Mary in deck chair

Tucker v/o: and anyhow we finished up, we got along very well, she had a marvellous temperament and this was something that

Tucker

Tucker sync: I'd never experienced before. She never lost her temper, she was marvellously equitable temperament and I didn't realise the goal that I had, again innocence is stupidity, because I realised that this was a most rare kind of female.

Photo. Mary standing in caravan

Tucker v/o: But anyhow it finished up that Mary stayed with me for nine years, and then the most peculiar thing happened.

Tucker

Tucker sync: She went off to the States to spend two or three months over there with her mother or similar story; that was the end of the relationship with Mary.

Interviewer o/s: She met somebody else?

Tucker sync: Yep, old story, the old thing.

Photo. Mary carrying painting

Tucker v/o: She was very good though, she took some paintings with her which it turned out to be very, very good because she was marvellous

Tucker

Tucker sync: like many Americans, a good little wheeler dealer in these things, and she took my paintings around and she planted them in the gallery named the Poindexter Gallery in New York

Photo. Alfred Barr

and apparently Alfred Barr who was then the man who started the whole Museum of Modern Art

Tucker

happened to go into the Poindexter Gallery and saw these paintings of mine. There was one there that rather intrigued him

Tucker painting

Tucker v/o: and later on I got confirmation that they had in fact decided to buy the painting or acquire the painting.

Interviewer o/s: What happened with Mary?

Tucker v/o: Well

Tucker

Tucker sync: Mary later, again a curious synchronicity, developed cancer of the breast and she died in 1975. So, you know, these were all rather, rather tragic sort of little wind up to these situations.

Interviewer o/s: Why did

Photo. Tucker

you decide to come back to Australia?

Tucker v/o: For some reason or another I was painting these

Tucker

Tucker sync: wounded landscapes when I was in Italy. I was, anything involving -- I was getting nostalgic memories of Australia but the thing I was remembering were the splits on gum trees

Tucker painting. Slow zoom out to CU

Tucker v/o: and the corroded earth and the cracks in the earth, all these kind of tactile images were coming up and I put this down to the landscape. And so then I formed

Tucker painting

a kind of human head that was half landscape half head, see

Tucker

which again was out of my nostalgic recollections of Australia, because I'd been away long enough then to feel bursts of nostalgia.

Photo. Sweeney as young man

Interviewer o/s: You also had a son here.

Tucker v/o: Oh yes, I had Sweeney here and, of course,

Tucker

Tucker sync: reconnected with the Reeds and I was going to, while I had initially trouble with Sweeney -- he was at his mid difficult adolescent phase, but once he got out of that we got along marvellously well.

Interviewer o/s: Had he stayed with the Reeds that

Photo. Sweeney as young boy with John and Sunday Reed

whole time?

Tucker v/o: Most of it he had, most of yes.

Interviewer o/s: Did he come to see you at all overseas?

Tucker

Tucker sync: Oh overseas, oh yes. Well again, that's another whole episode. The Reeds took him overseas with them in 1949, I think it was, and stayed over for several months, quite a while.

Photo. Sweeney as young boy with John Reed

Tucker v/o: At this point they'd been, Sweeney had been with them longer than with me see because once I got there my

Tucker

Tucker sync: plan was to come back within the year but of course I had no fare, I had no way of getting the money, I was broke right through most of that time. So time went on and finally Sweeney was with them, he'd been with them for about three years and he'd been with me two and they more or less, the Reeds, and I think properly they were quite legitimate in this, he'd been with them so long and they'd invested so much of their life in him and okay they said they wanted to adopt him.

Photo. Tucker holding young Sweeney in his arms

Interviewer o/s: So you signed the papers for adoption?

Tucker v/o: Yes.

Photo. Joy Hester in swimsuit

Interviewer o/s: And what of Joy, had she died two years after, as the doctor had predicted?

Tucker v/o: Oh no, no he was way out of that. She took

Tucker

thirteen years. She was getting remission after remission, which was a known, it was known thing then with Hodgkin's Disease and this was where the doctors, that conventional doctor then who'd told you there that you know that you're going to die in six months time, I mean for god's sake there couldn't be a more self fulfilling prophecy. I mean it's a good way to kill anyone; this was shooting silver bullets into them.

Photo. Sweeney

Interviewer o/s: How did Sweeney die?

Tucker v/o: Suicide.

Tucker

Interviewer o/s: Do you know why?

Tucker sync: Well I, this whole story should tell you that. I think that terrible things happen to children when their mothers abandon them when they're young at the crucial, formative period. I think it sets in a-- it sets in a time bomb which goes off in its own good time and Sweeney's own marriage was falling on the rocks

Photo. Sweeney

Tucker v/o: and I also miscalculated

Tucker

Tucker v/o: Sunday's attitude to Sweeney which led to her to overindulge him and make him develop expectations of life which life would never fulfil for him, which meant he was foredoomed then to a tremendous frustration.

Photo. Tucker

Interviewer o/s: This was yet another loss for you.

Tucker v/o: Oh lord yes, oh lord yes. Very much so.

Tucker

Tucker sync: But, you know, you develop, you go through these crises in your life or these disasters where you either live or die with them and if you live with them you find some kind of adaptation or reconciliation to them.

Photo. Barbara

Interviewer o/s: What made you feel ready to take on another marriage?

Tucker

Tucker sync: Well I think the, where two are male and female, they are two halves endlessly in search of each other, trying to find the right half. And so I was at a stage in life where I just didn't want to live on my own and I got to -- this was when I met Barbara when I came back, this was the last phase of my life shall I say, later, I hope not the last [laughs] but the later phase, shall I say. And so I met her I think around 1962 and saw a lot of each other and we married in, I think it was 1964. There we are.

Interviewer o/s: And what has that relationship meant to you?

Tucker sync: What Barbara? Oh very important, of course. Any male-female relationship is very important, very important, because you women have an insidious power to invade the male psyche and take it over and manipulate in this way and that, so one has to be aware of it and of course you're well aware of that but we're not supposed to be.

Photo. Tucker

Interviewer o/s: What has been the happiest period of your life, or do you find

Tucker

that word 'happy' a difficult one?

Tucker sync: It's all, it's not difficult I just find it meaningless, because it's a very superficial notion of what life is about. If I answered it in a broad sense, I'd say I'm very happy to be alive and I'm very grateful to be alive and to have had the opportunity to fight the good battle, and this makes me happy. And to feel that I've get any, win anything along the way or that I get to the end of it and feel that I've won more than I've lost, then this is an occasion to say I've led a fulfilled and happy life.

Photo. Tucker, Joy Hester and Sweeney

Interviewer o/s: You didn't ever have any other children.

Tucker v/o: No.

Interviewer o/s: So do you feel

Tucker

sad now that you're not leaving behind...?

Tucker sync: I do, yes, very much so. In fact, quaintly enough to fit your position there, one of the things I'd love to have probably, because I've got a friend like this there who has three daughters and they're quite marvellous to their father and I envy him enormously, believe me.

Photo. Tucker in studio

Interviewer o/s: But you will be leaving really a sort of legacy of a body of art.

Tucker

Does that give you a lot of satisfaction?

Tucker sync: It does, yes, it does. I've left a few hundred paintings, I don't know I've never counted them, I don't know how many, but I do feel that whatever the struggles and conflicts and difficulties of my own life and, I did work out the resolution of a lot of them through images and painting and I'd hope this plot sort, gives a sort of an autobiographical diagram almost, a diagrammatical account of my life, because I think it can be traced through all that now. And so I feel that I've left a few footprints behind, shall I say, and so that'll have to be a substitute for the children.

Painting

Credits begin over:

Interviewer
ROBIN HUGHES

Music

Painting

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Camera
JENNI MEANEY
ANDRZEJ LADA & RAY PALIN

Painting

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Sound Recording
MARK TARPEY

Sound Mixing
ROBERT SULLIVAN

Self portrait

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Research
GRAHAM SHIRLEY & FRANK HEIMANS

Painting

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Marketing Executive
KAYE WARREN

Painting

Production Manager
FRANK HAINES

Painting

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Production Accountant
CAROLYN JOHNSON

Painting

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Production Assistant
AMANDA HOWITT

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Production Coordinator
JANE MANNING

Painting

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On-Line Editor
NICKY LIDDELL

Painting

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Film Australia would like to thank:
Albert and Barbara Tucker
Australian National Gallery
Australian War Memorial
Museum of Modern Art NY

Painting. Pan left across painting

Credits continue over:

John Fairfax Ltd
Herald & Weekly Times
The West Australian
The Age

Producer/Director
Writer/Editor
FRANK HEIMANS

Executive Producer
SHARON CONNOLLY

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Film Australia
(c) MCMXCIV

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