Jeff Nuttall

Further notice on the artist, poet and actor

John Calder's otherwise excellent obituary of Jeff Nuttall [6 January] contained a major error, writes Michael Hrebeniak. Nuttall in fact fathered a girl and five boys - complementing his overwhelming masculine exuberance - all of whom he regarded with a characteristically visceral passion.

Accordingly, as a lifelong socialist he loathed the bilge and cant of the Blair administration, and his overlooked book Art and the Degradation of Awareness, which Calder published in 2001, remains a peerless analysis of New Labour's venal Year Zero aesthetic, and what Nuttall saw as its complicit Brit Art racketeers, led by the advertising millionaire Charles Saatchi.

The poet and cultural critic Eric Mottram called Nuttall "the only genius I've known" - Mottram was in a good position to judge, having moved freely within the circles of the post-war American avant-garde. And indeed, as a painter, sculptor, poet and "instigator of the drama", Nuttall probably had few equals in Britain. He also played jazz trumpet with a nod to Henry "Red" Allen, thereby completing his mastery of art disciplines.

With his passing, to join Mottram and Bob Cobbing, the New British Poetry has lost its final most significant proponent. He was a true Dionysian, whose energies - emotional and physical - would brook no compromise.