SIR: I am grateful to Christopher Heathcote (March 2016) for his thorough dismissal of attempts by feminist academics and curators to reinterpret and politicise Arthur Boyd’s Bride series. The overwhelming openness and ultimate mystery of these humanist paintings is central to their universal resonance. The “Angry Penguins” painters believed in artistic autonomy. They were deliberately apolitical, partly because they believed that art transcended politics and partly because of their bitter fight and narrow victory over the communist Realists in the Contemporary Art Society who demanded social, as opposed to individual and personal, “responsibility”. Recent attempts to politicise the Bride series…