Bert and Ned: The Correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan by Patrick McCaughey

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Dust jacket has light creasing at edges and spine. Dust jacket is now enclosed in glossy protective covering. Interior and binding are still excellent.

Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan were friends and rivals, but never antagonists for the whole of their working lives as artists. Together they participated in the struggle to establish modern art in Australia in the 1940s. Both produced a series of paintings that changed the direction and the content of Australian art: Albert Tucker painted The Images of Modern Evil between 1943 and 1947, and Nolan painted his first Ned Kelly series in 1946-7.

From the outset, they were regarded as major artists possessed of a powerful and original vision. Yet by a quirk of fate, they rarely lived in the same city or the same continent after 1947. Each, however, deeply valued the friendship and strove to preserve it through this remarkable correspondence.

Covering more than thirty years, the letters cast refreshing new light on their expatriate years in the 1950s and mark their changing and changeable attitude to Australia, both as a place and a culture. Trusting and confident in the other's discretion, they wrote candidly about their struggles and their experiences in Europe and Australia. The letters are particularly revealing about their early patrons, John and Sunday Reed, with whom both had troubled, complex relationships. Not since the letters of Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts has Australian art seen such a personally riveting and art historically important exchange between two major artists as these letters between 'Bert and Ned'.

Patrick McCaughey, the art critic and historian who knew both artists, has written an introduction that explores the themes running through these letters and has annotated them so that the reader can feel and hear the voices of these vivid and lively correspondents. (book flap)