In the early 1960s Robert Dickerson gave his father a collection of his paintings. Regarding them as a waste of time, his father burnt them all.
‘They didn’t encourage my art,’ remembers Dickerson, speaking from the backroom of his son’s gallery in Woollahra, Sydney. Later ‘I said to him: “You know how much money you burnt? Thirty thousand dollars’ worth.”
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Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a Sydney writer and contributor to the New York Times, the Economist, the Guardian, the BBC and the Wall Street Journal.
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