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  • Published: 28 September 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746319
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

Dear Sun




Correspondence between Joy Hester and Sunday Reed.

Correspondence between Joy Hester and Sunday Reed.

Love's intention and the reverse of love's inention slowly mark my life...and on the banks of these dark rivers we become - become what we are to each other and become what we are to ourselves. Sunday Reed

I am so conscious of my own limitations that I'm afraid I'll never do the things I dream of - but always I think of you and wonder what you'd think...And how you have always given me so much pleasure because you bothered to follow what my silly dreams were... Joy Hester

Joy Hester was the only woman member of Angry penguins, Melbourne's radical art coterie of the war years, and the wife of Albert Tucker. Sunday Reed was her closest friend, a wealthy, charismatic patron of the arts. Their correspondence follows the ebb and flow of their creativity, struggles with illness and poverty, losses and gains in love, and their heated intellectual and artistic debates.

Friends and loved ones cross the pages of their letters, among them, Albert Tucker, Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, Barrett Reid, John Percival and the Boyds. Dear Sun is both the intimate portrait of a friendship between two extraordinary women and a fascinating insight into a remarkable period in Australian art.

'A rare and compelling record of a passionate friendship…' The Sunday Age 'More than anything, Joy and Sunday talk of love…Another kind of love sustains this book: the intense commitment to a project, the complex attachment to a subject, of a biographer.' The Age

  • Published: 28 September 2011
  • ISBN: 9781742746319
  • Imprint: Random House Australia
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

Janine Burke

Janine Burke is an art historian, curator and novelist. In 1977, she was the inaugural art history lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts. She published Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940 (1980) and won the 1987 Victorian Premier’s literary award for Second Sight. Her books on the Heide Circle include Joy Hester (1983) and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004). She wrote The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006) and curated Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing for the Freud Museum London (2014). More recently, Burke has focused on nature. After writing Nest: The Art of Birds (2012), she curated an exhibition of nests at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery. In 2016, she curated Human/Animal/Artist: Art Inspired by Animals there. She is Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne.

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