Australia's Father of Art History - National Gallery of Victoria

Sheridan Palmer
NGV Tribute
Bernard Smith - Australia’s father of art history.
I came to know Bernard Smith late in his life as his biographer, when he was reflecting on
a long and distinguished career, turning every polemical stone and contemplating his
own final curtain call. He was a formidable and brilliant inter-disciplinarian who had
steered a critical course through much of art history’s movements, especially those of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was his ability to lift art out of its narrow
confines towards a global historical reading that won him the reputation as Australia’s
most eminent art historian.
Bernard Smith’s development as an art historian was unique. Initially self trained, he
aligned himself with writers, poets, artists, unionists, the Contemporary Art Society and
the Communist party during the 1940s in Sydney, but it was his friendship with a number
of exiled European scholars and artists that prompted him to consider Europe as his
Antipodes. Indeed Bernard’s concept of antipodeanism was about where one stood in
relation to elsewhere. His first book Place, Taste & Tradition published in 1945
deciphered the shifts in Australia’s cultural development and it also clinched him a
scholarship to study at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in London where he
developed his pioneering thesis on European Vision and the South Pacific. This history of
British colonisation and cross-cultural exchanges looked at the root of contact between
dominant imperial powers and the peripheral cultures of the Pacific region and it is still
recognized today by many scholars as Bernard’s masterpiece.
The last time I spoke in this great hall was at another important art historian’s memorial
tribute, that of Dr Ursula Hoff, a valued colleague and a good friend of Bernard. When
looking at a work of art, Ursula Hoff would ask, ‘Now tell me what do you see’. Bernard
however, would ask ‘Now how can we define it’. This encapsulates his approach to both
his work and life. A work of art, like a person, or a suburb, had to be contextualised,
historically situated within his, her or its social and cultural framework, have an origin and
an end. Looking backwards and defining the contours of culture, ideas and art was
cardinal for Bernard in understanding the present — it meant identifying and anchoring
objects and styles in time and place.
Identity also concerned Bernard Smith. He believed that Australia’s identity developed
initially under conditions of cultural displacement and geographical distance as well as
the guilt associated with native dispossession. Moreover, he recognised his own

limitations when addressing aboriginal art and culture, but as he said, he was neither an
anthropologist, nor was Aboriginal art visible in the middle decades of last century,
except ‘in small doses, and in artistically marginalised spaces’. 1 Bernard’s historical
revision of Australia’s cultural developments was Eurocentrically based and not from an
Indigenous cultural perspective, but this changed when he gave his 1980 Boyer Lectures,
The Spectre of Truganini. In this powerful treatise on the state of indigenous Australians
he evoked the past — ‘the colonial crime’ — as tragedy and the present as having the
potential for redemptive liberation. These inspirational lectures, for many who heard
them, awakened the need for a legitimate nationhood amongst Aboriginal people.
Bernard Smith was something of ‘a politician of the arts’, and was often prepared to stake
his career on major aesthetic and socio-political issues. In the 1940s it was with social
realism; in 1959 it was the ‘Antipodean exhibition and its manifesto’; in 1961 ‘the myth of
isolation’;
2
and in the late 1960s and 70s, with his wife Kate, it was the fight to save the
suburb of Glebe with its distinctive Federation architecture from freeway destruction. In
1992, after Karl Duldig’s ceramic relief sculpture was destroyed in St Kilda Road, Bernard
was instrumental in Arts Victoria and the National Trust collaborating to establish a
register of all public works of art in the State of Victoria. Preserving the past and its
traditions was paramount to him and whether he was looking at a picture by one of
Captain Cook’s artist’s or a painting by Richard Larter, he felt the past informed the
present.
As art history’s éminence grise, Bernard approached his ninth decade with vigour and
refused to be dislodged by generational change, deciding to identify and name the
beginnings and the end of Modernism. His swansong The Formalesque was published in
his 92 nd year. In 2006, Ron Radford wrote to Bernard.
You are our greatest living historian, our finest scholar in the humanities and one of
the few … to establish a world reputation while working on the ‘antipodes’... We are
immensely grateful to you for all you have done for Australian art and for Australia. 3
And finally, one thing remains undisputed, Bernard Smith was not only a major player in
the course of Australian art history; he defined it.
Thank you.
1 Daniel Thomas, ‘Aboriginal Art as Art: Who was interested’, paper given at New Visions: Histories of Art in Australia, NGV
International, 3 June 2006.
2 David Boyd interviewed by Sheridan Palmer 14 September 2009. NLA .Oral History Project oh-6111-0002-0002
3 Ron Radford to Bernard Smith, nd, c. October 2006, Bernard Smith Papers Acc. 10.088, box 56, National Library of Australia