After Heide

A book of letters between ‘Bert’ and ‘Ned’ resonates nicely with the famous letters of Smike to Bulldog, published in 1946, the year young Albert Tucker completed his first images of Modern Evil, and Sidney Nolan began his first Ned Kelly paintings. The fascination of this correspondence, between artists destined to be as famous for their period as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts for theirs, is that it shows them flirting. ‘Bert’ tries to be graceful, ‘Ned’ to be scrupulous; both with an eye to history.

Nolan, in Patrick McCaughey’s words, ‘possessed great charm, and was socially easy, light of touch, witty but a withheld self, easy to get along with and hard to know’. Whereas Tucker, in the words of Robert Hughes, was ‘difficult … brutally shrewd, obsessed with reputation … the victim of his own abrasive honesty, a man with no mask. “Why should I try to get on with people? … I don’t like people! Most of them are destructive bastards!”’ Their painting styles were no more likely to merge than their personalities: hence their friendship – surprisingly for these notoriously difficult men – was unruffled by rivalry.