Bernard Smith (art historian)

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Bernhard Smith, 1948.

Bernard William Smith (born October 3, 1916 in Balmain , New South Wales , † September 2, 2011 in Melbourne , Victoria ) was a leading Australian art historian and art critic .

Life

Bernard Smith was the illegitimate son of migrant worker Charles Smith and Rose Anne Tierney, a young Irish immigrant. His father was 30 years older than his mother. Smith grew up with a friendly working-class foster family in Sydney's Inner West , met his father a few times, but corresponded regularly with his mother. His childhood as a state ward was a formative experience.

During his school days, he showed artistic talent when he made clever but boorish caricatures to please the spokesmen among the students. Smith took pride in his drawings, though he later regretted the cruelty to others. He then studied at the University of Sydney and received training as a primary school teacher. Between 1935 and 1944 he taught in the Department of Education of New South Wales . From 1944 he worked as an education officer for the Country Art Exhibitions program of the Art Gallery of New South Wales , where he organized major traveling exhibitions for the regional New South Wales.

In his painting of this time, under the impression of the looming Second World War , he felt drawn to surrealism and painted dark allegorical scenes. Believing that his art was too advanced, both in form and content, to be understood by the conservative Australian audience, Smith decided to work as an art historian instead. In 1945 he published his socio-economic analysis of Australian art from its colonial beginnings to the dawn of modern art with the title Place, Taste and Tradition . The great success of his work earned him a British Council scholarship in 1948 to study at the Warburg Institute and Courtauld Institute of Art in London .

Smith had joined the Communist Party of Australia , of which he was a member for many years, under the impression of the 1930s and 1940s, when fascism had dramatically changed national borders and political power ; however, he resigned from the party in 1950 after witnessing the political reality in Europe. His return to Australia in 1951 occurred during the Cold War ; In this political climate, his earlier communist activities, despite all his academic training, were now an obstacle to the further development of his career. With the help of the painter Mary Alice Evatt , from whom he accepted an order to create a catalog of her paintings, he was able to continue working at the art gallery. Smith then received a research fellowship at the newly established Australian National University in Canberra , where he did his PhD. In 1956 the new faculty of fine arts at the University of Melbourne accepted him as a professor, where he and his colleagues Joseph Burke, Franz Philip and Ursula Hoff established art history as an academic discipline in Australia.

In Melbourne in 1959, Smith assembled a group of figurative artists who came to be known as the Antipodeans ; Among them were the painters Charles Blackman , Arthur Boyd , John Brack , Robert Dickerson , John Perceval and Clifton Pugh , who rejected an orientation towards Abstract Expressionism in his then stronghold New York . To this end, Smith wrote the Antipodean Manifesto . He published his study Australian Painting in 1962, after which he wrote from 1963 to 1966 as an art critic for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. The University of Sydney appointed him director of the newly formed Power Institute of Fine Arts in 1967 . In 1977 he resigned from teaching at the institute and was active from 1977 to 1980 as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities , of which he was a founding member.

The art history faculty at Melbourne University accepted Smith as a professorial fellow . He also received the French award Chevalier des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres .

In 1941 he married the Englishwoman Kate Challis, who died in 1989. After his death in Melbourne in 2011, Bernhard Smith left behind his second wife Maggi, whom he married in 1995, and his two children, John and Elizabeth, from their first marriage. He was buried according to the Catholic rite.

reception

Christopher Allen, art critic for The Australian newspaper , named Smith in 2011 "the first and so far only great historian of Australian art to whom the rest of us owe". He was a committed historian who, despite superficial fashions and profiteering in the art world, would always have made his own judgment. In a 2016 article, Allen wrote that Smith was "rightly considered the father of Australian art history."

Andrew Fuhrmann of the Sydney Morning Herald described Bernard Smith as "the greatest art historian Australia has ever produced".

Publications

Books

  • Place, Taste and Tradition. A Study of Australian Art Since 1788 . Sydney Ure Smith, Sydney 1945, reprinted Melbourne 1979.
  • A Catalog of Australian Oil Paintings in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales 1875-1952. The Gallery, Sydney 1953.
  • Antipodean Manifesto . Victorian Artists ′ Society Gallery for The Antipodeans exhibition in August 1959, Melbourne 1959.
  • European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850. A Study in the History of Art and Ideas. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1960. Reprinted 1985.
  • Australian Painting Today. The John Murtagh Macrossan Memorial Lecture, 1961. St. Lucia, Queensland University Press, Brisbane 1962.
  • Australian Painting, 1788-2000. Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1962. New editions 1971, 1991 with Terry Smith, 2001 with Christopher Heathcote.
  • The Architectural Character of Glebe, Sydney (with Kate Smith), University Co-operative Bookshop Press, Sydney 1973, reprinted 1985.
  • Concerning Contemporary Art. The Power Lectures, 1968-1973. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1975.
  • Documents on Art and Taste in Australia. The Colonial Period, 1770-1914. Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1975.
  • The Antipodean Manifesto. Essays in Art and History. Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1975.
  • Art as Information: Reflections on the Art from Captain Cook's Voyages. Sydney University Press, Sydney 1979.
  • The Specter of Truganini. Australian Broadcasting Commission , Sydney 1980.
  • The Boy Adeodatus. The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard. Allen Lane, Ringwood 1984, reprinted 1985 and 1994.
  • The Art of Captain Cook ’s Voyages. With Rüdiger Joppien , Oxford University Press, three volumes, Melbourne 1985–1987.
  • The Death of the Artist as Hero. Essays in History and Culture. Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1988.
  • The Art of the First Fleet and Other Early Australian Drawings. Edited by Bernard Smith and Alwyne Wheeler, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1988.
  • Baudin in Australian Waters. The Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands 1800-1804. Eds. J. Bonnemains, E. Forsyth and B. Smith, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1988.
  • Terra Australis. The Furthest Shore. Eds. W. Eisler and B. Smith, International Cultural Corporation of Australia, Sydney 1988.
  • The Critic as Advocate. Selected essays 1941-1988. Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne 1989.
  • The last photo. Longman, Harlow 1989.
  • Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, Carlton 1992.
  • Noel Counihan. Artist and Revolutionary. Oxford University Press, Melbourne; New York 1993.
  • Poems 1938-1993. Meanjin, Carlton 1996.
  • Modernism's History. A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas. Yale University Press, New Haven 1998.
  • A Pavane for Another Time. Macmillan, Sydney 2002.

Selected essays

  • European Vision and the South Pacific . In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 8 (1950), pp. 65-100.
  • Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Cook's second voyage . In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 19 (1956), pp. 117-152.
  • Art Historical Studies in Australia with Comments on Research and Publication since 1974. ( Memento of July 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Proceedings of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Volume 12, Edition 1982–1983, pp. 44–73.
  • Sir Joseph Burke, 1913-1992. ( Memento of July 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Proceedings of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Volume 17, 1992 edition, pp. 46-49.
  • Modernism and post-modernism. Neo-colonial viewpoint — concerning the sources of modernism and post-modernism in the visual arts. Thesis Eleven, Vol. 38, 1994, pp. 104-117
  • Modernism, post-modernism and the formalesque. Editions 20, 1994, pp. 9-11

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthew Westwood: Bernard Smith dies, aged 94. In: The Australian, September 7, 2011.
  2. ↑ Christopher Allen: Hegel's Owl: Life of Bernard Smith, father of Australian art history. In: The Australian of October 21, 2016.
  3. ^ Andrew Fuhrmann: Hegel's Owl review. The life of Bernard Smith, pioneering art historian. In: The Sydney Morning Herald of June 21, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Bernard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith, Bernard William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian art historian and art critic
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Balmain , New South Wales
DATE OF DEATH September 2, 2011
Place of death Melbourne , Victoria