Bernard Smith

Through works such as Place, Taste and Tradition (1945), Australian Painting 1788–1960 (1962), and his 1980 ABC Boyer Lectures The Spectre of Truganini (1980), Smith examined the development of Australian art and explored broader questions of Australian cultural history and historical memory. Smith held appointments at several Australian universities, including the University of Melbourne and as the founding Professor of the Power Institute, The University of Sydney. In 1991 Smith established the Kate Challis RAKA in memory of his wife Kate (1915-1989). Awarded annually and valued at $20,000, the prize recognises outstanding work by Australian Indigenous writers and artists.

Bernard Smith studied at Courtauld Institute of Art and University of Sydney. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is art criticism. Employment is recorded with University of Melbourne and University of Sydney. Distinctions recorded are Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Smith was born in Balmain, Sydney, to Charles Smith and Rose Anne Tierney on 3 October 1916. An illegitimate child, he was a ward of the state and raised in foster care, experiences he later described in his award winning autobiography The Boy Adeodatus. The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard (1984), which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction (Nettie Palmer Prize) in 1985.. Smith was educated at the University of Sydney. Between 1935 and 1944, he taught in the NSW Department of Education. In 1944 he became an education officer for the Art Gallery of NSW organising travelling art exhibitions. In 1948, he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, University of London. On his return to Australia in 1951, Smith resumed his position at the Art Gallery of NSW. In 1952, he received a research scholarship at the newly established Australian National University, where he completed a PhD. A shorter version of his thesis, European Vision and the South Pacific, was published in 1950, and released as a monograph in 1960 by Oxford University Press. Smith was appointed lecturer and then a senior lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Fine Arts Department (1955–1967). In 1959, he convened a group of seven emerging figurative painters known as the Antipodeans, which organised its only exhibition in August 1959 and with them composed The Antipodean Manifesto. Between 1963 and 1966, he worked as an art critic for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. In 1967, he became the founding Professor of Contemporary Art and director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, a position he held until his retirement in 1977. During this period he was also involved in debates about the role of art and architecture in contemporary Australian society. He was associated with the art workshop known as the Tin Sheds, although he clashed with some of its founders over its direction. Smith was also active in heritage campaigns in the inner-city suburb of Glebe. In 1969 he became an inaugural president of the Glebe Society, which was formed to oppose large-scale redevelopment proposals and promote the conservation of the suburb’s nineteenth-century streetscapes. With his wife, Kate Challis, he published The Architectural Character of Glebe (1973), documenting the architectural history of the suburb. After his retirement from full-time academic positions, he returned to Melbourne, served as president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and continued to publish extensively. With the German art historian Rüdiger Joppien, he co-edited The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, a three-volume study of the visual material produced during the expeditions of James Cook. In 1993 he published Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary, a biography of the Australian social realist artist Noel Counihan. In 1980, he presented the Boyer Lectures entitled The Spectre of Truganini brought the history of colonisation into mainstream public debate and was one of the first public condemnations of the Australian government's policy of removing Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, now known as the Stolen Generations. Smith was appointed Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Smith’s papers are held by the National Library of Australia, and his personal library is held by the State Library Victoria.

• "European Vision and the South Pacific", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8, no. 1/2 (1950): 65–100 • "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Cook's second voyage", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19, no. (1956) 117–152 * * • "Modernism and post-modernism: neo-colonial viewpoint—concerning the sources of modernism and post-modernism in the visual arts", Thesis Eleven 38 (1994) 104–117 • "Modernism, post-modernism and the formalesque", Editions 20 (1994) 9–11

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