Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen (Erik Jensen, Black Inc.)

When the Archibald Prize-winning artist Adam Cullen died in 2012 at the age of 46, the Australian art world was unsure who it had lost: a vulgar, naïf enfant terrible, or the inheritor to Sidney Nolan’s brush? A sensitive, tortured seer, or a gun-mad junkie and inveterate provocateur who got off on keeping company with the likes of Chopper Read? As Erik Jensen reveals in this engrossing biography, Cullen was all of these things—and much more besides. Jensen was just 19 when he was invited by the painter to move in with him under the pretext of writing his biography. He became virtually the only steady, non-chemical, non-intoxicant presence in what proved to be Cullen’s final years. As a biographer, Jensen is sensitive in the word’s best sense: Cullen’s contradictions and hubris, his grace, humour and bitterness, his solipsism and his desire to ‘be free’ of a social contract whose overly prescriptive model of success he had chafed against his whole life, are all vividly sketched. Jensen, now editor of the Saturday Paper, has delivered a lucid portrait of deeply complicated talent; it’s one of the best nonfiction releases of 2014 to date. 

Gerard Elson is a writer and bookseller who works at Readings St Kilda

Category: Reviews