Architecture, Art and Photography
Book Details

Bert & Ned

The Correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan

Patrick McCaughey

Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan were friends and rivals but never antagonists for the whole of their working lives as artists.

Opinion

This fine and illuminating collection of letters shows an intimate, charitable and at times confessional relationship. And it is through this relationship, enlivened by their letters, that an insight is given into Australian post-war modernist art.
Christopher Bantick, Courier Mail, 28/10/2006

“. . . it lays bare the intellectual and emotional bones of the artistic temperament on which is built muscle of art.” AFR Magazine ‘Book of the Month’

About this Title

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 Trucker 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 deeply valued the friendship, however, and strove to preserve it through this remarkable correspondence. Covering a period of more than thirty years, the letters throw refreshing new light on their expatriate years in the 1950s and mark their changing and changeable attitude to Australia, both as place and culture.

Trusting and confident in the discretion of the other, they wrote candidly of their struggles and their experience in Europe and Australia. The letters are particularly revealing about their early patrons, John and Sunday Reed, with whom both had troubled and complex relations.

Not since the letters of Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts—the celebrated 'Smike to Bulldog' correspondence—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 various themes running through these letters and annotated them so that the reader can feel and hear the voices of these vivid and lively correspondents.

About the Author

Patrick McCaughey was born in Ireland in 1943 and came to Australia at the age of ten. He studied Fine Arts and English at the University of Melbourne and became art critic of The Age in 1966. After a period in New York on a Harkness Fellowship, he was appointed Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University in 1972 and went on to become Director of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1981. He left Australia in 1988 and was successively director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Yale Center for British Art. In 2003 he published his Australian memoir, The Bright Shapes and the True Names and in 2006 the Miegunyah Press published his Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

Book Preview

978-0-522-85261-5