Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1916 Sydney, Australia

Died: 2011 Melbourne, Australia

Year of Migration to the UK: 1948

Other name/s: Bernard William Smith

Biography

Art historian Bernard Smith was born in Sydney, Australia on 3 October 1916. During the late 1930s he worked as a school teacher in Sydney and in rural New South Wales, before serving as an education officer for the Art Gallery of New South Wales' country art exhibitions programme from 1944. At this time Smith mixed with unionists, poets and writers, as well with individuals from the Contemporary Art Society and the Communist Party (developing his own left-wing views), but it was his encounter with a number of European refugee scholars and artists that prompted him to organise a series of art lectures presented in Sydney in 1943. In 1945 Smith attended evening classes on classical archaeology at the University of Sydney given by eminent scholar, Arthur Dale Trendall, an experience that proved to be fundamental to Smith's intellectual development. In 1945 he published his landmark work Place Taste and Tradition, a socio-economic history of Australian art, from its earliest colonial and scientific beginnings, through to the Heidelberg Impressionists, Surrealism, and the Modern movement. Smith was the first to recognise that Australian art originated from the scientific drawings of the early colonists, and to situate it in an international context, arguing that Australian art was the result of an exchange between European vision and Antipodean experience. The book generated a healthy debate among artists and critics concerning nationalism and realism and it was the first Marxist interpretation of artistic culture in world art history.

Thanks to the success of this book, Smith was awarded a British Council scholarship in 1948. He postponed completion of his undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney to begin postgraduate research at the Warburg Institute, by now affiliated with the University of London, focusing on the origins of European art in Australia. Initially, the English reaction to this topic was disbelief, for, as he often said, ‘the reigning sovereigns in art history considered that all the Europeans brought to the Pacific was the Bible and syphilis’ (Australian Academy of the Humanities obituary). Encouraged by his supervisor, Professor Charles Mitchell, and by German émigré art historian Rudolf Wittkower, he began to develop ideas that formed the basis of his 1960 book European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850, still regarded as a major turning point in the study of colonial exploration in the Pacific and the most influential work of scholarship produced by an Australian art historian. In London Smith attended lectures by some of the most talented British and European minds, including Ernst Gombrich, which were fundamental to his development. At this time, he lodged in the Abbey Arts Centre, an artists' colony to the north of London, where a number of young artists – many from Australia – lived and worked. The centre was owned and run by Jewish ethnographic art collector, and owner of the Berkeley Galleries in London, William Ohly. Among the artists living there at the time of Smith's arrival were the Australian painter Leonard French and the Scottish artist Alan Davie. At the Abbey Smith also met the British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, at the time advisor to the South Australian Gallery in Adelaide. Ohly, who was looking for financial help to sustain the Abbey, introduced Smith to Clark. Although Clark had Smith in mind for the newly-vacant directorship of the South Australian Gallery, given Smith’s left-wing sympathies, the idea came to nothing. Smith later recalled that Clark had read Place, Taste and Tradition, but that ‘it was probably a bit too far left for him' (as cited in Pierse 2012, p. 29).

Moving back to Australia in 1951, Smith returned to his position at the New South Wales Art Gallery. In 1952, he was awarded a research scholarship at the newly established Australian National University, where he completed a PhD. From 1955 to 1967 he was a lecturer and then a senior lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Fine Arts Department and, between 1963 and 1966, he worked as an art critic for Melbourne newspaper The Age. In 1967, he moved to Sydney, where he became the founding Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts, a position he held until his retirement in 1977. In the same year, he returned to Melbourne, where he became the president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, until 1980. Later, he was a professorial fellow in the department of Art History at the University of Melbourne. Bernard Smith died in Melbourne, Australia on 2 September 2011.

Related books

Sheridan Palmer, Hegel's Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith (Sydney, Australia: Read How You Want, 2017)
Jessica Anderson and Christopher R Marshall eds., The Legacies of Bernard Smith: Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016)
Simon Pierse, Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950-1965: an Antipodean Summer (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012)
Sheridan Palmer, 'Bernard Smith 1916-2011', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, No. 12, 2012
Bernard Smith, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2007)
John O’Brian, ‘Bernard Smith’s Early Marxist Art History’, Thesis Eleven, No. 82, August 2005
Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History: a Study in Twentieth Century Art and Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
Bernard Smith, The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Bernard Smith, Australian Painting, 1788–2000 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962)
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: a Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)
Bernard Smith, 'European Vision and the South Pacific', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 , 1950, pp. 65-100Bernard Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition: a Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1945)

Related organisations

Art Gallery of New South Wales (education officer)
Australian Academy of the Humanities (president) (president)
Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney (professor and director) (professor and director)
University of Melbourne (lecturer and professorial fellow) (lecturer and professorial fellow)
University of Sydney (student) (student)
Warburg Institute, University of London (student) (student)

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Bernard Smith art historian