‘Our befores and our afters’: Another antipodean perspective on Bernard Smith?

Intellectual biographers are likely these days to speak of their person’s life story as a ‘trajectory’, as though a person were something subject to the laws of physics, being moved through a lifetime by measurable forces. When Peter Beilharz published his unique investigation of Bernard Smith (1916–2011) as a cultural theorist in 1997, however, when Smith was 80 and author of ‘more than a dozen books’, he began by asking: ‘Who is Bernard Smith?’ (Beilharz, 1997: xi). ¹ The question’s deceptive simplicity may have seemed ironic or even playful. More than 20 years later it seems even more appropriate to ask whether we know who this man was.

With a wealth of autobiographical material published by Smith himself and his vast correspondence archived, with his academic honours gleaming as trail markers and tribute volumes flowing, it would appear easier today to place him precisely in the landscape of Australian and indeed global scholarship. Sheridan Palmer’s thoroughly researched biography of 2017 offers this very thing (Palmer, 2017). Rising from his beginning as a ward of the state to becoming a primary school teacher, and in relatively short order President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, if Smith possessed a trajectory it assuredly followed no external law. His erratic progress appears to have been stoked by a prodigious sense of self confidence. Like all successful people he needed luck, but the impression his writings leave is that he knew from the outset that he should maximise the potential of his intellectual gifts and confident ‘networking’ to create for himself a career that fitted his remarkable talents. The fact that he launched himself in the early 1940s into a then inchoate local scene of art criticism, art practice and semi-professional art history, and where only the bricks and mortar of the state art galleries offered hints of a career, accounts in part for the fragmented character of his early publications. Smith was firing salvoes in multiple directions to signal his presence. Yet he never ceased to work this way, not because he feared losing his hard-won eminence, rather because his mind was habituated to reflecting on the sheer complexity of the mental world he had formed for himself, ranging as it did from his agonising doubts regarding communism to finding ways to maintain a distinctive theoretical grip in art history when challenged by a torrent of new theory unleashed by his own students. If his historical and theoretical concerns seem at a glance virtually kaleidoscopic it is not because he was a polymath. It has more to do with his being permanently, obsessively, as the French say, engagé with what made the art world tick, and how he might personally intervene to push it in what he was absolutely sure were profitable directions.

In 2004 Bernard Smith wrote to me, seeking support for his ongoing argument that his term ‘the Formalesque’ should replace the term modernism. Familiar with his Modernism’s History (1998), I replied that while I admired his courage in questioning an entrenched style label, I doubted he would succeed, in part because art historians had so much invested in protecting their territory. His reply, from which this review essay title is excerpted, was as follows:

…As you say I do not expect my case for the Formalesque to be accepted by the art establishment. But I do hope that it will not be met by the silence of contempt. I long for a discourse. In the end my case is almost stupidly simple. Librarians and booksellers need separate shelving to locate their material. We can’t avoid classification in any field of thought. And it will become increasingly difficult as the years pass to call a Modernism modern that is no longer modern. Of course we must continue to puzzle over where the break should come or as in the case of Mannerism [which I had raised comparatively] whether there should be such a firm break at all. But as you say the generic terms arise, willy nilly, because they are needed to give temporal structures to historical disciplines. Any one doing close work can with good sense ignore them. They usually work within them. But we just cannot do without our befores and our afters. Books have their chapters and our own lives have their beginnings and endings. But I cannot contemplate the death of our discipline as smugly as [Hans] Belting and [Arthur] Danto do. ²

Those familiar with Smith’s life and work will recognise the issues and their timing, at the moment when The Formalesque was in preparation. The fantasised death of art history confronted Smith just when he was contemplating his own demise. Peter Beilharz, who published his penetrating study Imagining the Antipodes (1997) while Smith’s Modernism’s History was still in press, judiciously commented that:

Smith’s usage of the ‘formalesque’ seeks to locate aesthetic modernism as a style or genus: in this it is consistent with his sense that types organise things better than image of authorship or the masterwork. More basically, the image of the formalesque seeks to remind that the image of forms ought not to be constructed as though it were exhaustive of the world; we form, and transform, but we also exist in other ways or upon other levels. (Beilharz, 1997: 168)

Smith knew that although he had taught me at Melbourne (1963) I had become a European specialist, with Franz Philipp as my mentor. Nevertheless, after 2000 Smith sought me out to chat about my Warburg Institute experience (1967–70), and about Gombrich. Smith’s rivalry with Philipp for the Sydney chair in 1967 had terminally soured their collegial relationship for the three years remaining in Philipp’s life. We didn’t talk about Philipp, yet his spirit was present. I would never have taken my doctorate at the Warburg were it not for Philipp’s guidance. At this late point in Smith’s life I had still not investigated his two years of ‘study’ at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1948–50). Philipp never mentioned Smith’s having set foot there. Another decade passed before I looked into it. It is now 50 years since I went to the Warburg and changed my ‘antipodean perspective’ forever. Would I have reacted differently to Smith as a teacher had I known that he had prowled the same library stacks and profited from Charles Mitchell, who arrived at the Warburg in 1969 to invite me to teach with him at Bryn Mawr College? I had no idea then that Mitchell had been Smith’s mentor for his writing of European Vision. I returned briefly to Melbourne in 1970 and Mitchell visited the university, praising the students he had received from Melbourne for his American department. I still didn’t understand his connection with Smith, who was then Power Professor in distant Sydney. These reminiscences are prefatory to saying that, apart from following Smith’s publications, it was only after The Legacies of Bernard Smith conference in 2012, to which I gave a paper, that my focus on Smith became concentrated: my ‘befores and afters’ (Gaston, 2016).

I am thus a newcomer and old hand where Smith is concerned. My reading of him as teacher was determined by my growing attraction to the directions Philipp was encouraging. It’s important to register that my first degree had been in history at Melbourne, repeating the trajectory enforced on Philipp, when as a refugee with an incomplete doctorate from Vienna in 1945, he had to repeat an undergraduate course, choosing history, as art history did not exist. Perhaps this similarity kindled Philipp’s interest in me, and he knew that I had studied theory of history when I approached him to supervise my MA thesis. What I’m getting to is that a fissure then appeared in my consciousness regarding the evidentiary value of both ‘my’ disciplines. That fissure has never healed. No wonder I’m attracted to the work of art and architectural historians who have displayed similar afflictions: notably Michael Baxandall and Marvin Trachtenberg, initially students of English literature, the former with F.R. Leavis, the latter with Harold Bloom. These two display scepticism towards the received methodologies of their ‘second’ disciplines, and attend to a personalised conceptual range and writing style. Both launch attacks on the evidentiary security and intellectual courage of their new disciplines, raising hackles. Baxandall doubts that we can find the words adequately to describe the making and interpretation of art in history. Trachtenberg inverts comfortable paradigms and style labels, causing mayhem for true believers. ³ Both make their disciplines a lot harder to do. Their work is inimitable, raising the question, what do we learn from scholars whose methodologies can’t be replicated?

What troubles me and my historian friends most is extensive use of the subjunctive in art historical writing, especially in iconographic study. A distinguished historian of Renaissance Florence once asked me, commenting on a new book by a prominent art historian, ‘Tell me Robert, what do you think constitutes evidence in art history?’ I could only concur that extensive use of argument-from-probability was regrettable and no substitute for the financial columns in archives that constituted ‘hard’ evidence for him.

What, then, do we make of Smith, who is largely self-taught as a Marxist critic, art curator and art historian, who absorbs aspects of culture-historical, anthropological and art historical methodologies, while forging his own analytical tools? He reaches simultaneously into the workings of multiple disciplines. He reads voraciously and writes fearlessly. Yet he admits to being intellectually shaped, to having been convinced of certain disciplinary truths. He is at once open to new knowledge but forever closed to the proposition that he can’t disseminate his own version of things. As a writer he is a natural, for whom words are precious cargo. ⁴ But he is open to being tutored in an academic style that will assuage the standards of an academic community. Flexibility seems to be his hallmark: he desires ‘a discourse’ or ‘conversation’, even with bitter enemies, something that augments their hostility, because in the end he is not malleable.

The book under review offers varied paths into the problematic relations of Smith’s multi-disciplinary experience and what he made of it for his readers. For this reviewer, Smith’s work exhibits fissures that lead in numerous directions and I make no attempt to describe them all. ⁵ In his case the absence of a single, fundamental discipline from which he deviated and against which he tested his thought is perhaps a key issue to grapple with. There has been no one quite like him in Australian scholarship in the humanities. He was, more than any of us, sui generis. Let us turn now to the book, and after that to some further reflections on its significance (Butler and Palmer, 2018).

This ample volume contains a plethora of discourses originating with Bernard Smith, his students, admirers and critics. Twenty-five authors have responded to essays, lectures or brief selections ranging from Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition (1945) to The Formalesque (2007), some seeking distance from him and his fluctuating positions that remain contentious, others wishing to affirm their finding inspiration in his work. With Smith there is always more to consider, and then re-consider as we expose ourselves in that judgmental process entailed in writing historiography.

Historiography belongs to epideictic rhetoric, the genus devised for bestowing praise or blame (see Gaston, 2002). Laurent Pernot’s recent study eschews the traditional view of it as a flashy corruption of ‘noble’ forms of public discourse (deliberative, forensic), reading it instead as persuasive argumentation that ranges from encomium to vituperation, with the ethos of the author always exposed. Epideictic utterances leave much ‘unspoken’. Thus, in Pernot’s words, space is left for ‘hidden messages, idiosyncratic positions, veiled criticisms; [also for] a psychopathology of encomium (envy, flattery, even disgust)’ (Pernot, 2015: 173). Lest these categories seem but glimmers of a bygone tradition, I refer to the Introduction of the book under review, where the editors suggest that the collection bears some hallmarks of a Festschrift, ‘a classic academic exercise’ where

the tone is respectful, but not too much. Disagreement is encouraged as the ultimate mark of respect and is understood by both sides to be the case. The collection often even features a reminiscence by a contributor as to how the scholar in question allowed or even encouraged disagreement with them as a kind of academic ethos, thus justifying the approach taken by others of the essays in the volume.

This seems rarely true of Festchriften in art history, where a restrained, almost repressive tone of respect predominates. After all, art history before the 1970s used to be a discipline laden with upper-class dignity, with a whiff of old money. Exceptions among Festschriften occur, and they are vulnerable to external attack where politics is concerned. A Festschrift dedicated in 1964 to the formerly pro-Nazi Hans Sedlmayr, was condemned to oblivion in E. H. Gombrich’s acidic review (Wood, 2000: 13). Gombrich himself abhorred the idea of a Festschrift, preferring a live concert of classical music. He was given a Festschrift anyway. The potentially more critical variety of ‘studies in honour of’ seem more numerous in philosophy and critical thought, both acknowledgedly concerns of Smith. If the volume is published post-mortem, one cannot risk defaming the teacher, but one can seek to diminish or magnify his contribution. The editors here look for balance by inviting authors both Australian and international, ‘a number of whom had met and known Smith personally, but also from a younger generation who knew him only from reading his work’. The contributors selected the ‘text or excerpt that meant something to them personally and that they would like others to read’, and wrote ‘a brief introduction to it’. Thus the editors give authors room to move, while bestowing an imprimatur arising from Smith’s own relentlessly self-critical and multi-directional tendencies:

However, in an uncanny way, there was the sense that Smith himself had already written in advance how they could respond to the work. That is to say, if we argue with Smith’s work, this is only to make an argument that Smith already had with himself. The paradox might be that a powerful thinker like Smith leaves a legacy, his work lives on, not insofar as it is unified and internally self-consistent but insofar as it is divided, already its own reading or critique. A powerful thinker’s work is always doubled, split from itself, its own Antipodean perspective. It is itself what allows us to think beyond or after it.

This deft licencing of critiques that may irreparably damage, since they may be attributable to the author’s irremediable lack of self-consistency, has a suggestion of the editors seeking to establish their own critical safety. Whatever ensues, on this reading, Smith has brought on himself. But is this ‘division’, the work always containing its own ‘reading or critique’, genuinely regarded here as a hallmark of ‘a powerful thinker’? Or does this ‘uncanny’ sensing infer that Smith could never really make up his mind about anything: never hold his ground with conviction? Would that be the mark of a truly ‘powerful thinker’? The editors address this question at length:

It is the thinking of the underlying condition of what is – its Antipodean perspective – that is the secret of all truly powerful thought. Smith is undoubtedly Australia’s greatest art historian and arguably one of Australia’s greatest humanities scholar[s] altogether. His work is a mainstay of tertiary art history courses all over the country, and in the years after his death it is still the subject of books, symposia and conference papers, still constantly the subject of debate, discussion and dissension. He is the one art historian in Australia, indeed, whose work we would predict will live on into the future. And it is interesting to speculate why. It is perhaps not ultimately, for all the depth and breadth of his research…the fact that he uncovered, the histories he narrated, the aesthetic evaluations he offered. All of these remain disputed, contested, in a sense provisional. They have to some degree been surpassed by further research, which admittedly Smith himself made possible. And Smith admits this. Apparently, waiting in the wings before the launch of his Australian Painting, he was heard to say, ‘Now all the art historians can point out my errors’, as though acknowledging in advance that his findings would be overturned, that art historians endlessly and with good reason would contest both the facts and his interpretation of them. No, the reason why Smith will live on, what is truly incontestable in his work, what he in a way invented, as [sic] least for this country, is a certain logic or structure. It is a logic or structure…of Antipodality or an Antipodean perspective. It is a certain reading of Hegel for Australian conditions, but it is also to show that Hegel was already Australian.

The most interesting point, I think, is the overlooked significance of Smith’s comment at the launching of Australian Painting, presumably the first edition of 1962: ‘Now all the art historians can point out my errors.’ Having just declared him Australia’s premier art historian, one might expect the editors to comment on what appeared to have been Smith’s weighty irony. I shall return to this question below.

The volume’s chronological arrangement justifies a substantial introductory essay by the editors that navigates a course through and around the shoals of Smith’s massive oeuvre, and the contributors begin not with Smith’s childhood recollections but with Place, Taste and Tradition (1945). Tim Bonyhady, whose writing on his family history in Vienna and their refugee experience from Nazi occupation qualifies him admirably to explore the antipodean sensibility, offers a brief historiographic introduction (pp. 1–3) to Smith’s ‘Impressionism in Australia’ (pp. 4–10) from Place, Taste and Tradition. This concern Smith’s adoption of the ‘collective term’ Heidelberg School ‘for the work of Tom Roberts, Fred McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder’. Bonyhady recounts that his first exploration of Australian landscape painting in Images in Opposition (1985) marked Smith’s use of the term as pivotal, although Smith himself, always honest about such matters, had identified Sydney Dickinson’s use of it for the work of Streeton and Walter Withers as early as 1890–91. Bonyhady tells how Smith in 1945 and Ursula Hoff in 1951 embedded the term in professional art history. He notes its imperfection but also its usefulness, filling in Smith’s reception process: ‘One can imagine Bernard, researching Place, Taste and Tradition…being impressed generally by the quality of Dickinson’s essays and appreciating his coinage.’ Becoming himself an expert on Australian Impressionism, and one of the editors of the Australia’s Impressionists exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in 2016, Bonyhady’s sympathetic estimation of the cultural reach of Smith’s research for his 1945 piece, a precocious awareness of ‘World Impressionism’ well before its coinage, is tempered by his just observation that a deeper maturity of analysis was to come later from Smith in his Death of the Artist as Hero, of 1988.

Maria Zagala, a curator of prints, drawings and photographs, introduces (pp. 11–15) Smith’s critical essays, ‘The Art Museum Today’ (1946) (pp. 16–21), and ‘The Art Museum and Public Accountability’ (1985) (pp. 22–35). Zagala conveys the pugnacious tone of both pieces, their attack on the pretentiousness of museum architecture, their upper-class patrons and limited range of contemporary artists: ‘his views, influenced by Marxism and the writings of…William Morris, promote the role of the art museum as an egalitarian institution’. His then role as education officer for the National Art Gallery of New South Wales was crucial, and Zagala teases out Smith’s links with the Evatts and Sydney Ure Smith in developing his ideas for touring exhibitions and marketing artists’ works. Zagala’s final section deals with the realization of Smith’s vision of art museums as ‘educational agencies’, ‘in many respects’, visible in today’s major art museums of Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia. She states: ‘It is hard to criticise these [recent] developments, for they represent an egalitarian shift in art museums, yet one wonders what Smith would make of them.’ By 1985 Smith was urging the museums to publish ‘complete catalogues of their holdings’ and ‘professional development’ for curators (taking up an older theme of Ursula Hoff’s), and resistance to ‘temporary exhibition blockbusters at the expense of collection scholarship’. That the National Gallery and British Museum in London afforded his model for the catalogues did reflect his 1948–9 experience there, and these models have never been displaced. Smith’s opinion that a general decline in ‘public taste’ had perverted ‘the intentions of [the museum’s] founders’ (p. 17), and his accusation of curators acting improperly as ‘taste-makers’ (p. 33), remain contentious issues.

Anthony White, Australia’s expert on Italian art in the 20th century and widely published on modern and contemporary art in the USA and Australia, offers a tightly argued piece (pp. 36–9) on Smith’s ‘The Fascist Mentality in Australian Art and Criticism’ (1946) (pp. 40–49). Intended for Place, Taste and Tradition, this essay surfaced instead in the Communist Review. White outlines Smith’s radicalisation during the 1930s, noting the influence of Melvin Rader’s No Compromise: The Conflict Between Two Worlds (1939), a book arguing ‘that fascism was a modern form of irrationality nurtured on the ideas of Sorel, Nietzsche and Wagner through which capitalism concealed its oppression of the working class’. White sketches Smith’s critique in the mid-1940s against ‘the nationalism and racism of artists and critics such as Norman Lindsay’, but also connects these views to the broader phenomena of aestheticism and bohemianism, which stand accused of ‘elitism and dangerously mythical conceptions of history’. Smith’s preference for ‘socially engaged realist painting’ brought him into confrontation with Albert Tucker’s ‘art for art’s sake’ position, which Smith then aligned with fascism and Nazism. As White notes, Smith later regretted his ‘reaction to the mythical dimension of the work of Australian modernists associated with the Angry Penguins’. The international political issues here are subtly argued by White, and the persistence in Australia of such ‘dangerous proclivities’ as Smith opposed (racism, nationalism) are justly emphasised.

Ronald Millar, a painter and art critic, prefaces (pp. 50–53) The Antipodean Manifesto (1959) (pp. 54–7). Composed chiefly by Smith, from his own ideas and written comments submitted by artists, the Manifesto is now easy game, quaintly archaic in its passionate defence of figuration against abstraction, of ‘the image, the recognisable shape, the meaningful symbol’, needing protection against an alleged ‘attempt by puritan and iconoclast to reduce the living speech of art to the silence of decoration’. Millar offers a searing personal assessment of the singular motivations of the painter/critic Smith viewed in relation to those of his little cohort of distinguished artists, Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, Bob Dickerson, John Perceval, and Clifton Pugh. Millar comments on the contemporary attitudes of certain artists omitted from the group. He describes the Manifesto, with its ‘glum rhetoric’, as an ‘insensitive and bigoted document’ that sparked an ‘unhelpful’ and ‘silly’ culture war between Melbourne and Sydney. ‘It was’, he writes, ‘pointlessly destructive to denigrate non-figuration in order to support figuration. The two tendencies are not mutually exclusive, and have co-existed comfortably ever since.’ Millar’s demolition does not explicate the relevance of Smith’s political beliefs at the time, nor the successive reflections on the event (the Manifesto and the exhibition) generated by Smith in the following decades: one must turn to Peter Beilharz’s masterly account (Imagining the Antipodes, 1997: 97–126) for those details.

Elisa Bunbury, a museum curator, outlines (pp. 58–61) the genesis of Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), which she notes ‘has been more fully acknowledged from the 1980s onwards, when it was re-issued, and re-appreciated in emerging post-colonial discourse’. The Smith selection (pp. 62–73) is The First Fleet Artists (1960). It is correctly stated that Smith ‘undertook study’ on the topic in London in 1948–50, there ‘receiving his first rigorous art historical training’. It’s worth observing though that this ‘training’ was relatively unstructured, and that Smith’s 1950 article in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes was the book’s earliest partial draft. Bunbury describes Smith’s pioneering examination of ‘the earliest colonial Australian art within a socio-political and, specifically, scientific context’, demonstrating ‘what now seems evident: the need to unite “scientific curiosity and aesthetic vision,” and to analyse it within concurrent economic, political, religious, artistic and cultural ambitions and beliefs’. She usefully updates current research into the First Fleet watercolours, wrapping up on the antipodean appropriateness of Smith’s selecting the black swan ‘as the motif for his personal bookplate’.

Leonard Bell, an art historian who works on ‘cross-cultural interactions’, takes a fresh look (pp. 74–8) at the artist Augustus Earle in Smith’s European Vision, here described as ‘a mine of information and knowledge’, and ‘a truly pioneering historical study, combining primary research of images and texts…with rigorous contextualization’. This is a short historiographic essay on Earle research, based on part of Smith’s chapter (pp. 79–87) ‘The Australian Landscape, 1821–35: The Bivouac Situation’ (1960) (which should read ‘Colonial Interpretations of the Australian Landscape’) and throws up some fine insights:

Travel (as distinct from tourism) and migration tend to break the habitual. The self needs to change too, even become another, in order to really meet and begin to understand those who are different. Vide Cook, Banks, and Omai. And Smith was similar in that respect. He delved into unexplored territories, expanded our knowledge and understanding, and continued asking questions. Like Earle, he did not settle.

Bell waxes eloquent about the methodological parallels between Earle and Smith, and how we need ‘more like them’. As a note of caution, I recall that Desiderius Erasmus, an inveterate European Renaissance traveller, claimed dryly in a letter that travel did nothing to change or improve a man. But then he did not travel to the South Seas.

Greg Lehman, a Tasmanian Indigenous scholar, addresses (pp. 88–97) Smith’s foundational research in European Vision on the ‘visual history’ of colonial artists’ representations of the Australian Aboriginal people. Chiefly historiographic, this piece charts Smith’s relegation of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype, one that has lately resurfaced among ‘popular commentators’. Smith’s thesis in his chapter (pp. 94–7), ‘John Glover in Arcadia’ (1960), Lehman argues, was ‘that the experience of such encounters in the Pacific precipitated a seismic challenge to long-established biblical narratives of origin and racial relations by science and new aesthetic approaches to landscape and portraiture’. Using, in addition to Smith, Erwin Panofsky on interpretation, Walter Benjamin on historiography and Jaś Elsner’s account of rhetorical ekphrasis, Lehman seeks to disrupt how the ‘trope of the noble savage is generally couched as a sympathetic, if paternalistic, observation by a romantic exploration artist’. Lehman, during a 2013 visit to Oxford, observed the cultural prejudice against Antipodean scholarship still embedded, Smith being noted by one source as ‘the only proper art historian to have emerged from Australia’. Lehman’s interrogation of the ‘trope of savagery in serving to underline the image of Europeans as standard bearers of civility’ transitions from the racism perceived in the ‘“foolishness” of an Aborigine who wears an English coat’ to a new consideration of John Glover’s pictorial ‘fantasy’ of celebrating Aborigines, an artist ‘looking for a new Arcadian life [in] a land materially emptied of Aborigines’. Lehman welcomes ‘a renewal of critical interest in Smith’s work’.

Terry Smith, the art historian and critic who first extended the chronological coverage of Smith’s Australian Painting (1962), fittingly introduces (pp. 105–9) Smith’s lecture ‘The Myth of Isolation; (1961) (pp. 119–29), which, together with a second, ‘offer[ed] a succinct summary of the main ideas in the classic survey Australian Painting 1788–1960’. The opening sentence is equally concise: ‘Bernard Smith was an outstanding thinker about the relativities of power within the cultural flows between the great metropolitan centres and their peripheries, especially as they played out between Australia and its colonisers.’ Terry notes the ‘interventionist’ aspect of Bernard’s approach as being present in the lecture as well as in the Antipodean Manifesto. He unfolds an important back-story in Bernard’s admission that the Antipodeans exhibition in Melbourne (1959) had been intended (by him at least) to constitute what appeared in reinterpreted form, curated by Bryan Robertson and Robert Hughes, as Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1961. Terry states: ‘Robertson out-maneuvered him, by in effect including the Antipodean painters within a broader survey, and, on the walls, by successfully mixing the figurative painters with the Sydney abstractionists…[whereby he] overcame, but in a distant place, the parochialism of both camps.’ Terry sums up Bernard’s Marxist idea that for artists ‘individual consciousness’ was ‘shaped by…social character’ and ‘by the need to negotiate with external powers…and instincts towards nationalism’. The art critic and ‘would-be historian’ had distinct ‘obligation[s]’ to ‘articulate’ and ‘explain’ both the present ‘state of play’ and its historical genesis. Ultimately Bernard ‘invested his faith in the “blend of innovation and tradition as the deep source of the “vitality” of contemporary Australian art’. Yet for Bernard the ‘London critics’ still held the trump card of ‘acknowledgment’, or ‘recognition’, something he craved.

Heather Barker and Charles Green (respectively an independent scholar and art historian/artist) offer (pp. 130–36) something distinctly valuable, taking as their focus Smith’s Acknowledgments (pp. 137–9) from Australian Painting (1962) as departure point for a historiographic analysis of what they describe as ‘very much – determinedly so – the first work of academic art history on Australian art’. Too often such informative biographical source material is under-researched. The piece is about the impact of the ‘neo-colonial Cold War’s’ deleterious influence on ‘the few available outlets for art writing’, and how Smith’s book emerged as ‘the first comprehensive, interpretative history written of Australian art’ in a challenging political context that extended into the universities, as into every other organ of research and communication, including arts funding’. There are nuances here regarding Smith’s delicate relations with Joseph Burke, who had appointed Smith to the Melbourne department in 1954 (taken up in 1956) (Palmer, 2016: 160), and Barker and Green say, probably correctly, that at the time ‘the two mixed socially but were not personally close’. This may have changed later on. I purchased Burke’s author copy of his English Art 1714–1800 (1976) which has interleaved a handwritten letter from Smith in Fitzroy, dated 28.1.83, which begins:

Dear Joe, It was very good of you to send me a signed copy of your Dobell Memorial Lecture and I much enjoyed reading it last night. And thank you for your many kind references to my own work, which I do very much appreciate. I was greatly taken by the Australian landscape as a ‘charnel house,’ and I’m sure you are right to stress the importance of Drysdale in developing a changed attitude to the landscape.[etc.] With every good wish for 1983, Sincerely, Bernard. ⁶

As Barker and Green justly comment:

The Cold War crushed the Australian left. Imperial America now occupied centre stage, not Britain. Smith was still fighting a losing battle against abstraction when Australian Painting was published…Geopolitics, even more than contemporary developments in art, determined Smith’s innovations and thence Australian art history, though this is too easily forgotten by a young, local Australian art history anxious about influence.

Jane Eckett, an art historian and curator, prefaces (pp. 140–44) two pieces by Smith, his Great Display of Recent British Sculpture (1963) and Address Given at the Opening of the Second Mildura Sculpture Exhibition, 18 April 1964 (pp. 149–53). Her observations focus on Smith’s two provocative discourses, his The Age review of the touring exhibition (‘certainly the finest exhibition of sculpture ever to come to this country…unquestionable vitality’) and his face-to-face castigation of the Mildura artists’ show as ‘promising but alas still provincial’, allowing for the possibility ‘that already there are young sculptors here who will become the true professionals who will bring Australian sculpture to maturity’. What Smith wanted was ‘an important and active figurative tradition in contemporary sculpture overseas’ to acquire ‘representatives here in this country’. Eckett fits these two events into the broader discussion about Australian artistic provincialism, where it belongs. She shows too that Smith’s positions were immediately contested by sculptors and critics, misinterpreted, especially in relation to the work of numerous émigré sculptors, and above all, they were responsible for igniting her own research into ‘the Centre Five group of sculptors active in Melbourne from the 1950s’. There she wrestles with how might ‘a group of émigré sculptors be indexical of an Australian hybridity that absorbs outside ideas and enables them to continue developing independently of their original contexts?’

The art historian Catherine Speck takes (pp. 154–8) as her text Smith’s Arts Vietnam Exhibition Opening Speech (1968) (pp. 159–62), as we move to Smith’s tenure of the Power Chair in Sydney. Speck gives a detailed account of Australia’s entry to the war and the growth of opposition among groups including Melbourne’s Contemporary Art Society, and principally of Gallery A in Sydney, that had opened in 1964. The Vietnam exhibition, conceived ‘as a “silent” demonstration against the continuation of the war’, showed, among others, Ian Fairweather, John Brack, Judy Cassab, Robert Klippel, Margo Lewers and Jeffrey Smart, all agreeing to ‘donate 5% from sales to the anti-Vietnam cause, as did the gallery’. Speck records critical reactions to the show, and identifies in Smith’s speech an attitude ‘deeply imbued with the anti-Vietnam ethos that permeated all aspects of life in the late 1960s’. ‘His speech was feisty; he urged artists to become activists; and he called on the government…to reflect on the morality of their actions, and to end all association with “a false holy war.”’ Smith himself sought to distinguish this ‘gesture of dissent’ from ‘the involvement of the old left of the 1930s:

Then involvement meant the politicisation of art, its use as the vehicle of a political message. The new dissent is not tied to party, is often implacably uncompromising, cuts across stylistic divisions, and sees the creative artist as actively and even provocatively involved in social change both in his art and in his life.

This ‘total commitment to change’ may well have stood ‘in contrast to the quietism of the 1950s’ but seems to me not so simply detached, by subtracting the party, from the artistic activity of the old left as Smith claims. Were it known then, Smith would have relished the historical irony of Ho Chi Minh having hoped at the end of both World Wars that the United States would help save Vietnam from European colonisation (Logevall, 2012: 11–12, 99–100).

Smith’s chief collaborator in publishing the visual art generated during Cook’s voyages (1987, 1997), Rüdiger Joppien, introduces (pp. 163–7) excerpts from Smith’s Documents on Art and Taste in Australia 1770–1914 (1975) (pp. 168–74). This is a warm-hearted recollection of their collaboration and of Smith’s collecting of such documents for his books after 1945. Joppien reviewed the book for the Burlington Magazine in 1977 and quotes from that. His present reflections focus on how it ‘addresses foremost an Australian readership, but there is an international dimension in posing the question: how does art come into existence in the first place? What instances are responsible for its growth and dissemination in a society that had little history?’ Joppien sees Smith’s early concerns with ‘place’, ‘taste’ and ‘tradition’ showing through and Marxist interpretation having an influence on his readings of documents. Smith’s beliefs that Australian art was intrinsically ‘significant’ and had a place ‘in the world’ are presented sympathetically, and their example held to be influential in ‘other ex-colonial countries’. The selections are ‘Foreword’, ‘In a New Land’, ‘Hardship and Weird Melancholy’, ‘Education, Taste and Nature’, ‘The Impact of Paris’ and ‘Nationalism’.

Ian Donaldson, a historian of literature, and previously Director of the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, a position that tempted Smith in 1974 (Palmer, 2016: 258), comments on an edited version of Smith’s 1978 lecture, published as Art as Information: Reflections on the Art from Captain Cook’s Voyages (1979). This reveals ‘Smith at the height of his powers: traversing a long sweep of intellectual territory to stake out a provocative theory about the work of the artists commissioned by James Cook’. Observing Smith’s cross-disciplinary scope, reaching from art history into ‘ethnography, archaeology, classical architecture, Romantic poetry, imperial history, evolutionary theory, botanical and zoological classification, [and] maritime adventure’, and ‘spiced at moments with a whiff of scholarly mischief’, Donaldson foregrounds two theses of Smith’s. Namely that the ‘historical significance’ of Cook’s artists’ work was ‘underrated’ by ‘Europo-centric’ art historians, who also misunderstood the ‘literalist form of representation’ that Cook sought: ‘Art mattered to him as a source of information.’ Smith also made a case for a clearer understanding of several semi-trained artist voyagers who recorded prototypical plein air images of unusual weather conditions. Donaldson offers cogent criticisms of Smith’s rationale of the ‘evolution of modernist art’ as the ‘triumph of empirical naturalism over classical naturalism’. He points to more recent evaluations of Turner’s and Degas’ works to be taken on board and the need for more attention to ‘the inventive capacities of the artist: from the illumination of the mind’, than Smith had considered.

Darren Jorgensen, a historian of Australian and Indigenous art, prefaces (pp. 198–92) an edited version of On the Frontiers Within (1980), from Smith’s The Spectre of Truganini (pp. 193–8). Jorgensen considers the contribution of Smith’s Boyer Lectures to understanding the troubling issue of his avoidance of writing about Aboriginal art in both Australian Art (1960) and the Truganini book. Noting that in Truganini Smith avoided a history of ‘atrocities visited upon Aboriginal people’ but also side-stepped an account of visual art, ‘turning instead to histories of science, literature, poetry and politics’; tracing ‘the “cultural history” of almost two centuries of race politics’, Jorgensen records that Smith hoped for a treaty to emerge in 1988, the bicentennial year. But as late as 2006, ‘responding to Susan Lowish’s essay on his “blindness and insight” regarding Aboriginal art, Smith argued that at the time of the Boyer Lectures “There were ethical and moral questions still to be faced before the aesthetic issues could be resolved”.’ Jorgensen suggests that Smith thought of Aboriginal art as ‘a separate field of study, one that already had its authorities in anthropologists, archaeologists and the artists themselves’. Jorgensen views Smith’s Australian art history ‘as complementary rather than antagonistic to Aboriginal art and its history’, describing how the ‘artworld’s discovery of Aboriginal art’ in the 1980s and 1990s ‘would bring about the ultimate revision of Smith’s own scholarship, as Australia became the centre of art history rather than an outlier’.

The art historian Geoff Quilley writes (pp. 199–203) on Smith’s William Hodges and English Plein-Air Painting (1983) (pp. 204–20). Appreciative of Smith’s pathbreaking arguments in European Vision, and with a strong personal interest in historical geography and science, Quilley traces Smith’s 1983 piece into his Imagining the Pacific (1992), addressing again his foregrounding of the Admiralty’s remit to Hodges to produce images showing, as Smith records, ‘accuracy and immediacy based on empirical observation, and relayed through “art as information”‘. The influence of Smith’s reading of Hodges on subsequent British scholarship on ‘landscape representation’ between 1790 and 1830 in favour of considering ‘a shift’ in ‘the boundaries between science and art’, is documented in Quilley’s generous notes.

Cultural critic Peter Craven lavishes praise (pp. 221–5) on Smith’s ‘memoir’, The Boy Adeodatus, from which The Enclosed Garden (1984) is republished (pp. 226–42). Describing the work as ‘a highly wrought piece of autobiographical writing, literary in style and fictionalised in technique, with a third person narrative, which manages to be very nearly a parodistic portrait of the self emerging to a point of consciousness…rendered in something like Joycean mode’, Craven argues that ‘it is also at the same time a sort of microcosmic history of working people’, thus ‘one of the most subtle and grand works of biography ever written according to a flexible Marxist credo.’ ‘[T]here is’, Craven says, ‘a dazzling and engulfing attempt to enter the vision of working people, particularly the mothers, who made him what he was.’ Space dictates that I limit Craven’s comments, but he muses significantly on how the book presages (in retrospect) the mature art historian, emerged from the country primary school teacher, and how it needs to be assessed together with Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1987): ‘It’s funny, but the two unexpected masterpieces of Australian letters thirty years ago were both written by art critics…They were both works of history, both gifts of God, both books in which the cloaked armies of Catholicism and Socialism marched over Australian earth.’ We surely need further analysis of the creative synergy between writing art history and biographical fact and fiction that arose in these two men.

A penetrating preface (pp. 243–6) by the sociologist and cultural theorist Peter Beilharz to Smith’s Marx and Aesthetic Value (1986) (pp. 247–65) augments the views in his 1997 book, Imagining the Antipodes, on Smith’s distinctive interpretation of Marxism. There he noted which texts had the ‘strongest Marxian affinity’ with Smith’s own theoretical ideas (p. 192), with his ‘residual Marxism’ (p. 15). Here Beilharz explores Smith’s potential use of early Marxian texts inaccessible to him before 1960, yet still concludes that The German Ideology comes closest to Smith’s ‘interest in philosophical anthropology’. He shows how Smith either absorbed specific aspects of or skirted new readings of Marx that emerged during the 1980s, keeping pace with ‘cultural Marxism’ critics as he constructed the foundations for ‘his major and overlooked summa Modernism’s History’. Beilharz argues significantly that Smith extrapolated analogically his own angle of attack from Marx: ‘Bernard Smith was a relational thinker. One of his most enduring insights, that the antipodes is a relation rather than a place, takes its deepest echo from Marx’s claim that capital is not a thing but a social relationship.’ An accurate and touching comment closes this important meditation: ‘For he worked with the best of the materials available to him, and yet he left us something unmistakably his own, of his own time, place and culture and yet of enduring example to us, who follow.’ Beilharz’s final paragraph is a tantalizing reading of how Jimi Hendrix’s spectacular intervention with the Fender Stratocaster (formerly ‘twanged politely’) might be imagined in relation to Smith’s idiosyncratic, disruptive attachment to Marxism. Not incidentally, it seems to this reviewer remarkable that Beilharz’s Imagining the Antipodes is absent from this collection’s commentary and indeed scarcely mentioned, as though it has now somehow disappeared from critical view. How to explain that this deeply analytical and ceaselessly illuminating book-length critique of Smith as a cultural historian could slip out of sight? If, as Beilharz argues, ‘Smith’s work is perhaps the most significant social theory yet generated by an Australian’ (Beilharz, 1997: xii), then his ‘thinking through’ Smith’s work in all of its manifestations is bound to be profoundly worthwhile for students of Smith, from whichever perspective they might gaze.

Simon Pierse, an artist and art historian focusing on ‘British perceptions of Australian art and identity’, contextualises (pp. 266–70) Smith’s review article, Australian Art in England (1989) (pp. 266–85) from the journal Modern Painters, edited by Peter Fuller. Responding to harsh criticism from British critics to the exhibition Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, it draws from Pierse the insight that ‘it raises the issue of expressionism and British taste’, citing the continuous critical hammering there of Albert Tucker’s work from the 1940s to 2013. Pierse identifies ‘arrogance and conceit’ in the critical responses ranging from the Guardian and Sunday Times, to the Evening Standard, from top to bottom as it were, the latter’s critic’s comments being judged unworthy of ‘the amount of attention given to it by Smith’. Brian Sewell, author of the Standard’s evisceration in 1988, softened his stance in the Royal Academy’s Australia show review he wrote in 2013, in commenting favourably on the ‘international fame’ achieved ‘in the mid-20th century’ by Boyd, Tucker, Perceval and Nolan. But as Pierse shows, Waldemar Januszczak, in the Sunday Times ‘in a brutal attack on the show, lampooned paintings by Olsen and Fred Williams with childish lavatory humour’, among other derogatory comments. Smith’s claim that the reviews ‘revealed an appalling ignorance about the stylistic and cultural development of Australian art’ reiterated a defence he had presented to the world, and especially to London, since 1961. No wonder Smith ‘riled in silent fury’ when talking with Anthony Blunt about Australian art in 1949 (Smith, 2001: 237). It was to be a long struggle ahead.

John Frow, a scholar in literary and cultural studies, reproduces (pp. 286–92) with a preface his 1996 review of Smith’s Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (1992), reprinting (pp. 293–301) Smith’s chapter ‘On the Topographic Artists’ (1992). The review sparked ‘a polemical but courteous note’ from Smith, listing Frow’s critique of his use of the term ‘empirical naturalism’ but especially reactive to his ‘dismissal’ of ‘an unfortunate chapter on Coleridge’ that sought to connect The Ancient Mariner with ‘meteorological observations of Coleridge’s teacher William Wales, a scientist on Cook’s second voyage’. There was a methodological collision here between a literary scholar’s view of the genesis of poetic language and Smith’s biographical model that linked it to ‘direct experience’ or ‘the hardening of experience into learned forms’. Frow’s view that ‘poetic language has its own history and can’t be deduced in any direct way from the influence of other languages’ was not negotiable and Smith argued his case to no effect. This was an important review of Smith’s working assumptions, raising the vexed issue of his neglect of ‘genres’ and hinting at a weakness in recognising the presence and function of genre among the literary sources exploited in some art historical argumentation. In dealing with Smith’s ‘empiricism’ Frow notices ‘the difficulty that it has in dealing with the systematised layerings of abstraction that are formative of all knowledge’. Frow wants to talk in terms of ‘a shift from one set of genres to another, and…of the incorporation of a set of non-aesthetic genres into the aesthetic genres of landscape, portrait, and so on’.

Janet McKenzie, an art historian and artist, gives a sensitive account (pp. 302–5) of Smith’s professional encouragement of Noel Counihan’s work and reputation, reproducing (pp. 306–13) the chapter ‘War, Tuberculosis and Modernism’ (1983) from Smith’s ‘superb’ biography Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary (1993). McKenzie’s focus is also on the neglected friendship between Arthur Boyd and Counihan ‘that art history and politics had hitherto attempted to conceal or play down’, as well as the ‘common ground and shared experiences’ they enjoyed in both Melbourne and London. A scholar publishing on Australian contemporary drawing in 1986 and a biography of Counihan in the same year, McKenzie had Smith as an external supervisor for her later doctoral thesis on Boyd. Smith tipped her off to Boyd’s unexplored political engagement with Counihan and the former’s extensive involvement with numerous Jewish refugees, among them Franz Philipp, author of the first ‘professional’ book on Boyd (1967). McKenzie’s work on Counihan induced Boyd to invite her to probe more deeply, particularly into the political dimension overlooked by Philipp and Ursula Hoff. It was Smith who subsequently ‘uncovers previously ignored inconsistencies and omissions in the impact of socio-political affiliations by artists of this early period’, his sympathy for Counihan’s Marxist ‘stance as an artist’ also throwing light on an understudied aspect of Boyd’s work. Smith’s piece is a vivid account of the presentation and very mixed reception in 1941 of ‘expressionistic’ works shown by Counihan, Boyd, and Yosl Bergner.

Juliette Peers publishes on contemporary art and feminist studies, and her essay (pp. 314–20) on Smith’s brief ‘Preface’ to M.E. McGuire, All Things Opposite: Essays on Australian Art (1995) (pp. 321–2) explores the vagary of Smith’s historical and critical attitude to women’s art, ‘one of the most problematical and least defensible aspects of his rich and extensive worldview – an acrimonious relationship with feminist art scholars in the later decades of his life’. Peers describes the preface to Margaret McGuire’s essays as ‘both exceptional and highly informative in relation to evaluating the nature and intent of Smith’s impact upon his contemporaries and upon subsequent generations’, tracing his attitude to women, along lines now drawn in Sheridan Palmer’s biography, to his childhood experience of ‘the feminine presence’. Reporting feminist scholars’ work, Peers argues that Smith’s ‘interactions with feminism in art history parlayed into a distinctly personalised and emotionally volatile arena of contestation’ that ‘women artists were a particular blind spot in his weltanschauung, and the use of his overviews as bedrock to the mainstream art-historical trajectory has therefore rendered women problematical and even “strange” in the words of Jeanette Hoorn’. Peers identifies in Smith’s little preface, however, ‘his longest and most amiable engagement with the practice of feminist art history in all its multiple post-1970s permutations’. There he reveals a ‘warm and intimate’ approach to McGuire’s writings that, it is said, has roots in the ‘edenic garden’ in The Boy Adeodatus. Some detail is adduced here from Smith’s other writings, culminating in the observation that despite frequently expressed misgivings, ‘he remained an assiduous practitioner of its [feminism’s] central belief throughout his career, with both personal and political issues remaining indissolubly imbricated to the last decades’.

The art historian Ian McLean, in prefacing (pp. 323–6) selections from the introduction and conclusion ⁷ (to Smith’s Modernism’s History (1998) (pp. 327–35), presents a powerful argument drawn from personal experience with Smith as a teacher. McLean immediately establishes this intellectual intimacy: ‘When in Bernard’s presence his passion and commitment were palpable: he had a mission’. We are taken on a journey from Place, Taste and Tradition (1945) to The Formalesque (2007), emphasising the ‘masterly expositions’ of the former and European Vision (1960): ‘Always thinking synthetically even when being analytical, his mission was a new and fully systematic understanding of the place of Australian culture in the whole world.’ McLean suggests that Australian Painting (1962) and the post-retirement volumes on the Cook voyages were ‘a more analytical’ phase, ‘his most academic and laboured, which he gladly put behind him’. Intervening in 1980 was ‘his most prescient work’, The Spectre of Truganini, which McLean considers ‘the prelude of his last great visionary flight’, when ‘he dug at’ the ‘very roots’ of ‘Westernism’ in Modernism’s History, where ‘he sought to upturn current understandings of Westernism’s crowning jewel, modernism’. McLean’s characterisation of Modernism’s History as a poorly edited book that ‘trekked across the most trodden ground of recent art historiography, modernism and post-modernism’ is accurate. And the sombre, GDR-style production values didn’t help. McLean argues that Smith showed ‘an inadequate understanding of post-modernism’, skirting its ‘thought-world’ while trotting out his longstanding addiction to Marxism and Hegelianism. What McLean identifies as the book’s ‘great folly’, ‘the proposal to substitute the term the “formalesque” for that of “modernism”‘, was famously ‘ignored’ by the art history establishment, raising Smith’s professional ire and antipodean anxiety. McLean passes over this aspect (except for Smith’s somewhat puzzling move in seeking out Gombrich as an ally) to emphasise rightly the flaw in his

simplistic theory that reduced the course of modernism’s history to a dialectical engagement between two forms of mimesis: that of craft…which tends to abstraction; and that of Western fine art…which copies nature. Modernism…was the triumph of the former over the latter, thus verifying Marx’s Hegelian scheme that the oppressed are the motor of history.

The Formalesque is described by McLean as a ‘distilled…short primer’ derived from Modernism’s History with ‘complaints about post-modernism’ removed and offering ‘a pared-back overview of art history’s methodology and how it can account for modernism’. Importantly, McLean closes with these words: ‘It is Bernard’s last message to a new generation of art historians, who he believed had forgotten how new and tenuous is the idea of art history. Bernard feared that this fragile thing to which he had given his life would barely outlive him.’

Catherine de Lorenzo, an historian of Australian art and design education, offers a critical preface to Smith’s lecture In Defence of Art History (2000). She contextualises and questions Smith’s motives, which she describes as ‘a plea, one might even say philippic, to art historians to cherish the core components of “our discipline, namely, identification, classification, evaluation and interpretation”‘. Smith developed an abreaction to ‘the new art histories’ of the 1980s and 1990s that were ‘privileging…the viewer’s or the scholar’s interpretation at the expense of the other three more historical tools’. De Lorenzo shows (from the flyer of the original lecture) that the original title, with the subtitle After Listening to Jacques Derrida, signalled its confrontation with those (presumably including Derrida’s sponsor, Terry Smith) ‘who have directed a linguistic approach to a discipline that is grounded in the priority of the visual’. She relates Smith’s concerns with the deafeningly silent response to his Modernism’s History, where he had claimed that certain art historians ‘anguished over the end of art history’ may have ‘forgotten that “art history is not a kind of art [of interpretation], it’s a kind of history”‘. She notes that European Vision had received more reviews from anthropologists and geographers, indeed from ‘social scientists’, than art historians, arguing that art historians were then ‘still preoccupied with the study of European old and, to a lesser extent, European modern masters’. A diverse and more positive perspective on this would reveal (as I recall) that three art historians, namely Panofsky, Gombrich and Baxandall, received rapturous praise from citation hunters in the 1990s, recording that they alone among 20th-century scholars in the humanities received the widest extra-disciplinary citations for their work: the presumption being that ideas that skate across disciplinary borders will reflect credit back towards the ‘mother’ discipline, but only when it is practised in uniquely exploratory ways. Smith, seen from our antipodean viewpoint, surely belongs among this group.

De Lorenzo criticizes Smith for not establishing ‘conjoint courses’ between the Power Institute and the Mitchell Library where his students ‘could have built on’ his ‘pioneering scholarship…on the colonial archive, much of it falling outside the high art of conventional art history at the time’. She cites Smith’s colleague Donald Brook’s recollection that Smith refused ‘to work with colleagues to develop a curriculum that critically interrogated art history as a discipline, or questioned European art history as the finest manifestation of the discipline’. She lists Smith’s 1975 essay, ‘The Teaching of Fine Arts in Australian Universities’, as ‘probably his dullest essay’. There he argued that ‘virtually all art history courses taught in Australia taught Renaissance and post-Renaissance art because much art theory and history developed from that time. So much for his 1999 gibe at other art historians fixated on the Renaissance tradition.’

And here we reach a painful nub, where De Lorenzo laments what she personally sees as lost opportunities: ‘at this moment when departments of art history are shrinking and entire schools of art closed down, we might ruefully acknowledge he was also prophetic’. Palmer’s biography offers a detailed account of Smith’s decade at the Power, listing what he saw as his positive achievements, but also his lingering feeling in his 1990s that ‘he had failed to implement a “first rate structure”’ (Palmer, 2016: 225–61). However, one can surely say that after Smith’s retirement in 1977 decades of unfettered teaching of art history and theory followed in Australasian universities where younger scholars installed multiple new and different directions for the discipline. The much later (and in De Lorenzo’s telling) unwelcome presence of Smith in 2000, still hovering geriatrically over the discipline, and criticizing some of these new approaches, is implied in his publicly addressing the 1999 lecture to the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. Also germane (p. 345) is Smith’s definition of a discipline in 2000. It is worth noting, as it draws no comment from De Lorenzo, that Smith says (p. 344) that Franz Philipp ‘was responsible for introducing the discipline [of fine arts] as an academic subject into Australia’. I shall return to this point below.

I believe Smith has adapted without acknowledgement (or just from memory) from Gombrich’s little-read expanded lecture In Search of Cultural History (1969), which is not cited in Modernism’s History or in Palmer’s Hegel’s Owl. Smith writes (my emphasis in both authors): ‘A discipline is a bundle of procedures, a tightly interconnected set of practices. It is this interconnectedness that makes it a discipline, something more than an array of disparate techniques. Challenges to the identity of the discipline seek to dismantle one or more of these practices by arguing that they are irrelevant or illogical.’ Gombrich’s text (p. 46) reads: ‘It cannot be repeated sufficiently often that the so-called “disciplines” on which our academic organization is funded are no more than techniques; they are means to an end but no more than that…But it will be a sad day when we allow the techniques we have learned or which we teach to dictate the questions which can be asked in our universities.’ This probable link to Gombrich is interesting, considering that In Search of Cultural History was an attack on the persistent influence of largely unrecognized Hegelian precepts at work in mainstream 19th and 20th-century art history and cultural history. Smith certainly did read Gombrich’s lecture ‘The Father of Art History: A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831)’, published in Gombrich’s Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition (1984: 51–70), which summarised in a mere two sentences (p. 62) what he had argued in 1969, shifting his emphasis from rooting out Zeitgeist towards a critique of Hegelian determinism (he cites it in The Formalesque, p. 47, n. 24). Smith’s avowed divergence from a ‘metaphysical’ reading of Hegel in Modernism’s History (p. 8) may also be connected to his acquiescence with Gombrich’s 1984 paper. Gombrich delivered the 1969 lecture when I was in his work-in-progress seminar at the Warburg, where he reacted against speakers hypostasising styles (‘the Renaissance/Baroque does this or that’), or speaking of any explicit or disguised ‘spirit of the age’ or nation. It seems inexplicable that Smith, who evidently knew Gombrich’s lecture and his 1984 essay, still expected him to respond sympathetically to the patent but circumscribed Heglianism of his Modernism’s History. In writing to Smith, Gombrich in fact picked selected aspects that currently preoccupied him in Smith’s book and avoided pointless confrontation over Hegel. Smith’s appeal to the value of Hegel’s ‘philosophical’ reading of art was then of more interest to him than the angles that Gombrich had seen morphing into the Germanic peoples’ Volksgeist under the Third Reich.

Richard Woodfield does a considerable service to Smith studies in drawing attention to (pp. 361–5) Smith’s obituary (pp. 366–73) of Gombrich, ‘Ernst Gombrich 1909–2001’ (2001–2). Woodfeld asks ‘whether there was any common ground between them in their ambitions for their books: the Story of Art on the one hand and Modernism’s History, with its sequel, The Formalesque, on the other’. The unexpected parity here was Smith’s idea that like Gombrich’s early bestselling book, his last one would serve as a primer. Woodfield is suitably sceptical that Gombrich’s comment that Smith’s Modernism’s History ‘will remain the focus for discussion for many years to come’ could sensibly be applied retrospectively to Gombrich’s expectations for The Story of Art, a book first published in 1949 when Smith was in London, and took no interest in it. The Story of Art ‘had been written for teenagers as a first guide into the wonderful, unknown world of art’ but was not the standard ‘history of art as the roll call of styles’. Woodfield gives a brief, detailed history of the updating of the Story down to 1989, making the point that Smith correctly perceived, and was attracted by the fact, that Gombrich ‘never told the story of Modernism to echo the story told by its curators and academic historians, especially the family tree created by Alfred H. Barr, updated to include Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism and their aftermath’. And Woodfield notes that Gombrich later tempered his ‘admiration’ for Smith’s Modernism’s History in The Preference for the Primitive, saying ‘I wonder whether this theory offers a sufficient explanation for the momentous change in orientation the very notion of art underwent in the period concerned.’ Fundamentally, the two men differed, he explains, in their approach to ‘narratives of the development of styles’ and their ‘explanation of causes’. In closing, Woodfield raises the issue of the neglect of Gombrich’s ‘analysis in the Story of ‘the…factors which have changed the position of art and artists in society’, directed to ‘the new social functions of art’, suggesting that both men would have been stimulated by the (contentious) question: ‘What is the function of Aboriginal art within today’s Australian Museums of Modern Art?’ Smith’s obituary contains evidence that he understood (perhaps via Michael Podro’s obituary) Gombrich’s drive to excise the ‘collective mind’ as ‘explanatory in art or politics’, that ‘movements…were started by people’ not Zeitgeists. Yet Gombrich could still not abandon art history’s ‘generic concepts of “period styles”…from its vocabulary’. Smith fights back too in critiquing Gombrich’s brutal review of Arnold Hauser’s work in 1953, effectively ‘smothering’ a Marxist art history for the next 20 years. Yet he defends Gombrich against Bryson’s attack on him in Vision and Painting (1983). One could only wish that this slugging-match between the scintillating antipodean and the brilliant refugee from Vienna could have continued.

The final piece (pp. 374–85) in the book is by Emma Hicks, an independent art history scholar who researched for Smith’s books, and who draws together threads of Smith’s life and work as personally observed between 1976 and 2007. This is a valuable memoir, containing comments on how Smith’s exposure to Blunt ‘sharpened Bernard’s attitude towards the utter necessity of rigorous research to underpin any theorizing’. We know from Miranda Carter’s biography that Blunt had initially needed teaching this himself by the immigrant scholars from Germany and Austria (Carter, 2002). Hicks ‘embarked on researching some of the minutiae relating to Cook’s voyages, to help ensure the resulting volumes were as accurate as possible’, but she was open to the nuances of senses of distance experienced by Cook and mirrored in Smith’s own experience in England. She expresses this awareness thus: ‘It all opened my eyes to some sort of equation: distance over time equalling perspective and perception.’ Hicks made substantial factual contributions to Smith’s autobiographical works as well as to his historical ones. She describes the inquiring Smith of Modernism, though, as ‘the other’ Smith, signalled by ‘an urgency to stamp some authority on the increasingly chaotic notions of modernism and “post-modernism”.’ That’s an interesting recollection, but the plain truth is that to a close observer all of those style ‘notions’, from ‘classical’ antiquity onwards, seem to be out of control most of the time. They morph endlessly as new research and new theories strike home on their targets. That constantly shifting ground can surely be read as a sign of life in this strange, broadly-based discipline.

Now, if I may return to the issue of Smith’s playful/ serious expression of being separated from professional art history in 1962.

Unchallenged, the statement raises the inference that he didn’t then identify himself as an art historian, even if he was gainfully employed as one and publishing the first ‘professional’ university-based book on Australian art, this coming after European Vision and Place, Taste and Tradition, with its varied critical and historical content. The question has implications regarding the scope of the discipline as practised then in Australia, and above all as it was perceived by Smith himself. Smith would have known that Gombrich habitually tested (or jested with) interviewers, saying he was being mistaken for an art historian, despite being trained as one in Vienna, protesting that he was a ‘professor of the history of the classical tradition’, or of ‘Renaissance civilization’ (see Gaston, 2016). Smith’s self-awareness of his personally established role through publications as one of Australia’s most distinctive cultural historians may have been a factor here. Of course Smith’s sense of otherness from art historians ostensibly announces theirs from him. If it was an ironic joke in 1962 it nonetheless had meaning at the time, especially in relation to the teaching of art history in the Melbourne department, and in the perspective of what he had seen developing in London when researching European Vision.

Then he was, I suggest, to a not negligible degree, an outsider at the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes. Tom Ryan is careful in quoting Smith’s description of the terms of his British Council scholarship, permitting him to have a ‘non-academic’ enrolment, to be ‘a research student to work on “a piece of research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art”’ (Ryan, 2005: 18; cf. Smith, 2001: 158, 234). Having not completed his honours degree he was not eligible for admission to a doctoral degree at London University and could not enter the small group of doctoral students and elected research fellows at the Warburg who, with the academic staff, constituted what Gombrich later (in the 1960s) affectionately called ‘the family’. Smith describes his profitable contact with scholars at both institutes, characteristically acknowledging his intellectual debts. Indeed, one suspects that his peripheral association gave him a unique perspective on their activities: he could consult with a freedom that might have been frowned on were he enrolled for a doctorate under the possibly jealous supervision of an individual. To speak of Charles Mitchell’s advisory role as that of his ‘supervisor’ is misleading if taken in the normal academic sense. Smith himself writes in 2002 of his having needed to be allocated a ‘supervisor’ by Blunt at the time (Smith, 2001: 239). Sheridan Palmer appears to paraphrase when she writes: ‘Bernard returned to see Blunt and was told he could not read a formal course [that sounds like Blunt] at the Courtauld because of his incomplete honours degree. Instead he would move to the Warburg Institute and be supervised by Charles Mitchell’ (Palmer, 2016: 101). Smith recalls in 2002 that Blunt referred him across to Rudolf Wittkower at the Warburg, who then passed him on to Mitchell (Smith, 2001: 247–8). Smith did not have to be concerned with the fact that Gombrich despised Anthony Blunt as an art historian (see Gaston, 2016). Smith developed his own antagonism to Blunt arising from his supercilious condescension to Smith’s Australian origin and Australian art. That Smith, after his two years in London, went on to publish two splendid articles in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in short order is proof enough of how he managed to absorb what was available to him there, just as it demonstrates how well prepared he was, at least in his theoretical armoury, to produce the kind of work they desired. Careful editing of Smith’s submitted manuscript by Charles Mitchell took place, as always with the Journal’s articles, this writer’s included. This fact may surprise admirers of Smith’s writing style. The house style for the Journal, demanding elegant brevity (Mitchell called it ‘slimming’ and ‘a few phrases of my own’) permitted no exemptions (Palmer, 2016: 142; cf. Gaston, 2016).

Returning to Smith’s sense of professional identity in 1962, one has to consider that his ‘training’ was initially self-generated in Sydney, and that art history was then not among the subjects he could study at the University. Palmer has noted, however, that Smith imbibed the stylistic methodology of Dale Trendall’s archaeology lectures on Greek decorated pottery (Palmer, 2016: 93–5). Also, that as a multi-tasking art critic, artist, curator and art educator, and then with the PhD from the ANU, he joined the Melbourne department in 1956 to encounter an intimidating group of ‘professional’ art historians. Palmer and McLean have emphasised that Smith, by the early 1940s, was learning about Wölfflin and Strzygowski from the refugee scholars in Sydney, namely Stefan Polyak and George Berger, the latter, knowing Strzygowski’s work, offering adumbrations of a concept of ‘global art’ (Palmer, 2016: 64–8). Joseph Burke, Franz Philipp and Ursula Hoff represented, in their cumulative intellectual heritage, the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes, the Vienna School and the Panofsky pre-War enterprise at Hamburg, not to mention Burke’s experience at Yale. Research on these colleagues by Jaynie Anderson, Sheridan Palmer and Monica Lausch indicates that Philipp was elected to plan the department’s teaching content and theoretical structure. As Anderson summarises:

Burke, whose formation had been largely in museums, considered Philipp the ‘architect of the new department’, and that Philipp’s Renaissance course was the centrepiece for those going into art gallery and university work. The intellectual architecture was outlined by Philipp in 1948, in an ambitious article on the study of art history in Australia for Present Opinion. Scholars of the Viennese school were praised for having created a study of the ‘science of the mind’ (Geisteswissenschaften), which went beyond the historiography of Jacob Burckhardt or the unifying comparison of styles devised by Heinrich Wölfflin. So an Australian version of the Austrian ‘sciences of the mind’ was Philipp’s agenda for the new department. The fine arts, he thought, were a most significant expression of the collective content of a civilisation, more so than even literature or music, even though he felt passionately about music: ‘The correlation between the fine arts, especially between the architecture of a particular period and its communal life, is perhaps more tangible, and more accessible to the scholar’s enquiry’. Philipp had spent much of this time in Vienna and Melbourne studying pure history but, for him, of all histories art history was the most important, because ‘only in its art does a period become sublimated and truly accessible to inquiring contemplation’. (Anderson, 2000: 7–8)

In 1962 I took Philipp’s Renaissance ‘Fine Arts B’, and in 1964 his 4th-year ‘Theory and Method’ seminar, so I can confirm that both were permeated with both old and New Vienna School historiography and concepts, together with those of the Hamburg school dominated by Warburg and Panofsky. The difficult historiographic topics he set for the Renaissance essays proves this pedagogic emphasis at the time. I tutored the Renaissance course for Philipp in 1966. These subjects differed radically from others in the department, among them Smith’s ‘Fine Arts C’, his Neoclassicism to Modernism subject, which I took in 1963. This was far from being a theory-free zone. Its choice of material, foregrounding of certain artists and architects, and subtly probing attitude towards stylistic categories were implicitly theoretical. But the subject had an empiricist flavour (as others have testified): it flowed easily within its chronological structure, in contrast with the visibly complex, sometimes tortuous expositions of Philipp, who could rarely resist building ever more layers of theoretical problematics into his teaching. June Stewart, a passionate ally of Philipp, contrasted Smith’s ‘schoolmasterish’ manners with Philipp’s and argued that Smith’s ‘vision as a teacher had to be built’ in those early days (Palmer, 2016: 171).

Philipp knew that he could (almost) never have students who possessed Latin and medieval palaeography (such as he had needed in Vienna), and an acquaintance from childhood with great art collections and multiple European languages. One witnessed his almost physical struggle to compromise with the intellectual shortcomings that faced him in the classroom virtually free of German readers. Ironically, it was Panofsky’s volumes promoting ‘disguised symbolism’ in Renaissance iconography that were available in English translation at the time, not the works of Philipp’s Vienna School teachers, with the exception of the Americanised Hans Tietze. Gombrich was locked in an ongoing struggle with Panofsky in the 1950s about what he considered was ‘over-interpretation’ of iconography. He said in 1991 that Panofsky was ‘guilty of forcing the evidence’ (Gombrich and Eribon, 1993: 137; cf. Gaston, 1998). In Melbourne this explosive tension was kept under wraps. The hard truth was that Philipp’s plan for the department’s teaching could only be executed to perfection by himself. Smith did not have German, although he took French lessons from time to time. ⁸ The English translation of Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften (The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity) (1932) did not appear until 1999. Alois Riegl’s work on histories of style (Stilfragen, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie) and the concept of Aufmerksamkeit (attentiveness) in his book on Dutch group portraiture became accessible around two decades after Philipp’s death in 1970, the theoretical assessments erupting during the 1990s, and continuing now. As Monica Lausch has noted:

Examination papers set by the university in Philipp’s time reveal that students were asked to consider a range of topics traditionally associated with the Vienna School, including the significance of Ghiberti’s Commentarii (1952, 1960), the problem ‘Orient or Rome’ [posed by Josef Strzygowski] (1958), the interpretation of Roman art since [Franz] Wickhoff and [Alois] Riegl (1960), [Max] Dvorák’s interpretation of the High Renaissance, and the problem of linguistic convention and the psychology of artistic style as interpreted by Gombrich and [Ernst]Kris (1961). (Lausch, 2005: 124)

Likely Smith had some of these challenging criteria for ‘professional’ art historical scholarship rattling around in his mind when he presented Australian Painting in 1962. ⁹ If one adds the part-time but always imposing presence (‘reserved manner’ is the well-chosen term used by Palmer (2016: 169)) of Ursula Hoff, who took her PhD with Erwin Panofsky, and who was busy at the time raising ‘the professional status of a gallery curator’ by insisting on their ‘academic training’ in the same department, one can imagine how Smith, recalling London in 1949–50, could disingenuously or not, privately diminish his own professional status in the early 1960s.

When I invited Hoff to join me in teaching a single ‘Theory and Method’ seminar on Riegl’s Dutch Group Portraiture in 1974 she agreed but was reluctant, despite its being central to her research area: she was not attracted to theoretical approaches that originated outside her Panofsky circle. This is interesting in view of Christopher Wood’s comment in 2000 that ‘the profound dependence of the early writings of Panofsky on Riegl has been recognized in this country [USA] only relatively recently’ (Wood, 2000: 15). In that aversion to theory, Hoff differed fundamentally from Philipp, who was open to investigating all players, unless they happened to have turned pro-Nazi, like Hans Sedlmayr. Nevertheless, as Sheridan Palmer has recounted, Hoff and Smith developed a strong intellectual relationship after 1945, one that persisted until Hoff’s death in 2005. It was Hoff, in a statement published by Palmer, who in 2001 stated that she, Burke and Philipp had been ‘the first professionals of art history in this country’, and when Smith’s Australian Painting appeared she immediately added Smith to that list. ¹⁰ Still, I recall taking tea with Hoff in 1975 to discuss the proposed launching of the Australian Journal of Art, hoping to recruit her for the editorial board. Her comment was that it seemed a good idea, ‘but who will you get to write for it?’ I mentioned several names, and she silently shook her head. Smith had passed her test, but others would not.

In recounting these issues I do not seek arbitrarily to rank Smith’s published work against that of Philipp and Hoff. I can say that, to a student at the time, Smith’s teaching seemed less demanding without that ever-present overlay of European theory. Smith had of course then read Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, translated into English in 1929, and Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, duly cited in Place, Taste and Tradition. Wölfflin’s The Sense of Form in Art also became available in English in 1958. And Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art had been accessible in the 1880 translation by G. Henry Lodge, to mention some prominent texts. But it seems ironic that the efflorescence of French theory focused in Sydney after Philipp’s death would constitute yet another layer of eurocentric thought, one from which Smith recoiled, but mainly because of its foregrounding of the word over the image. When Smith had completed his important extensions (together with Alwyne Wheeler and Rüddiger Joppien) of European Vision in the volumes on Cook’s voyages, published in the decade after his retirement, he turned around 1990 to writing a major book on Modernism and to developing his theory of the Formalesque. Sheridan Palmer gives a detailed account of his motivations, and does not omit the significance in this process, in which she includes the meagre, stifled responses to publication of the book, of Smith’s re-establishing contact with Gombrich (Palmer, 2016: 304–14).

Ian McLean has offered elsewhere a brilliant account of Smith’s take on Winckelmann’s historiography, in the latter’s engagement with Europe’s first ‘Primitivism’ in identifying the otherness of the art of ancient Greece (McLean, 2011: 12). In McLean’s words, Smith ‘recognizes the cosmopolitan impulse that founded art historiography, namely, seeking an encounter with the other in order to make strange one’s own position’. McLean rightly argues that Smith perceived in the works of Semper, Riegl, Warburg and Strzygowski ‘a discipline interested in the world and not just Europe’. I am, however, as a student of the late antique, medieval and Renaissance periods, less convinced than McLean that ‘art historiography is a child of the Enlightenment and of the classic idea of Europe’. ¹¹ Smith follows Potts in reading Winckelmann’s distinction between ‘ a high and a beautiful style in classical Greek sculpture’ as entailing ‘two modes of excellence’:

This distinction opens out the possibility of an art history that developed a concept of style that escaped the organic analogy [attributed to Vasari] and the naturalistic imperatives that dominated the conceptual framings of Pliny and Vasari…[Winckelmann] suggested the possibility of a social history of art and also implied a strong element of relative autonomy in the dynamic development of art as a social institution. ¹²

Regarding historiography from my perspective, though, there was a significant activity of that kind in those earlier periods less visible to modernists who remain focused on the signposts Vasari and Winckelmann, and that are intensely debated in early-modern scholarship these days. ¹³ Smith’s idea of the Renaissance was arrested in his early reading, registering no response to the radical reassessments from the 1960s onwards of retrospective and problematical style nomenclature 1400–1600, to the patent antagonism of leading artists (e.g. Michelangelo) to classical styles and iconographic prototypes, and to the genesis of a probing art criticism, driven partly by the Church, and partly by humanist writers and translators, and by artists themselves, using the vernacular. Hostility towards Michelangelo’s works by contemporary artists has opened up new avenues of approach to, and a distancing of, ‘classicism’. Some of us read Vasari differently today than Smith did in the 1990s: we can see a ‘social history’ dimension in his Lives that was invisible to a superficial interpreter. The presentation of an art criticism in the European vernaculars testified to the alterity of its thought processes, now seen in contradistinction to the classical and medieval Latin traditions. Some 16th-century artists ‘appropriated’ medieval or classical art for their own diverse ends, much as postmodernists have in recent times. The ‘Renaissance tradition’ that Smith operated with as a foil to modernist and Australian art is today nowhere near as secure a concept amongst early-modern specialists as he thought. ¹⁴ Harsh critics who wrote the Counter-Reformation’s critiques of religious art are today mined for neglected critical sensitivities that will reconstruct the artistic aims of the ‘Mannerist’ works they sought to eradicate. ¹⁵ As we rediscover the systematic alterities present in the ‘Renaissance’ fields of art, we learn how different those people were from us in their views of the natural world, human biology, gender roles, social construction and moral compass. Art history’s assumed dignity of a process in which aristocratic patronage and humanist learning rubbed off on the artist has long underpinned our addiction to the cultural iconicity of Renaissance images. A shifting of our gaze towards ‘lesser’ groups and individuals has been predictable and necessary. The making of Renaissance visual art was as culturally contested a phenomenon as ever existed in Western history. Smith clung to the invention of mathematical perspective as the key to a new, decisively influential kind of representation that would persist in the Western tradition until modernism. Yet as global art tightens its grip on early-modern studies today the partially extra-European gaze of Renaissance collectors and artists is becoming more evident. Our post-colonial consciousness now wrestles with a Renaissance Europe so open to, so penetrated by, the ‘exotic’ artefacts and practices of Eastern cultures that it has challenged our grasp on the received notion of a unitary and classicising cultural Renaissance.

I suspect that in turning to select contributions of the Austrian and German scholars in the 1990s in researching modernism Smith perhaps chose tacitly to readdress both the theoretical structure that Philipp had proposed for the department in 1947 and tantalising issues that had reverberated in his consciousness at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in 1948–9. He may also have been smarting from the reaction to his paper ‘Art and Industry’ delivered in Gombrich’s work-in-progress seminar at the Warburg in 1973, when it was ‘ferociously criticised’ by Gombrich (Palmer, 2016: 253–5; Gaston, 2016: 48–9), something not unusual in that setting. Smith’s persistent contact with Gombrich after 1950, including an unsuccessful application for a Warburg fellowship in 1963 and other exchanges seeking his advice recorded by Palmer, may have lulled Smith into overlooking the fact that the Warburg director simply would not tolerate in his seminar ideas he considered wrong or even dangerous. Palmer’s summary of Smith’s piece, which I have not read in full, notes that ‘It complemented his archaeology of historical materialism, which had been a consistent part of his analysis of art and society since the 1940s and would continue to be.’ This Marxist aspect alone would have been sufficient provocation for Gombrich, regardless of whether, as Palmer argues, they shared ‘an intellectual alignment in their conceptual approach to roots of style and the use of perceptive and empirical methods as tools of cultural inquiry.’ Palmer relates how in 1963 Smith attached a letter to his fellowship application accompanying his John Murtagh Macrossan Memorial Lectures, 1961 (published as ‘Australian Painting Today’, 1962). If Palmer’s summary is accurate, there was a lethal error in Smith’s Latin that would not have helped his case. ¹⁶

While acutely conscious of Hegel’s Owl at this stage of his life, I suspect Smith was experiencing something like a Janus syndrome, an intense looking-backward while maintaining a certain forward-looking momentum in the discipline (Janus was the Roman god of entrances and exits). His persistence in acknowledging intellectual debt, and thereby gaining merit through association, contributed to the backward gaze. Oddly enough, in 1948–9 he had experienced from his antipodean viewpoint the London Germanic refugee scene in art history before Franz Philipp got leave to return to England and the Warburg as a Senior Research Fellow. Yet when Smith joined the Melbourne department in 1956 he was still not really capable of accessing, in their original language, the core teachings of that refugee movement. By 1995, owing to the diffusion of translations of the Vienna and Hamburg School works, the language barrier was largely removed. ¹⁷

In his 2005 paper ‘On Writing Art History in Australia’, Smith’s rejection of the art theory and French critical theory that had arisen after his time in Sydney cleared the way for his appraisal of some of those European art history theorists whose works were re-becoming central to the study of Modernism. His Modernism’s History required him to explore for the first time as full texts some of the sources that Philipp had nominated, more with hope than realism, as being crucial to a ‘professional’ understanding of art history. We will never know what Philipp might have thought of Smith’s attempt, but Gombrich’s ostensibly warm yet actually cool, utilitarian response was explicit enough.

McLean writes that Smith, in the end, ‘remained too close to old paradigms of art historiography…In clinging to the German professors Smith rejected the discipline’s Cold War retreat into the Occident but also missed the opportunity to develop a historiography adequate to the post-imperial world’ (McLean, 2011: 17). True, Smith ‘missed [that] opportunity’, but he took up a challenge in its place that represented something of deep personal importance to him, namely to leave his mark in his final years in a field dominated by European, British and American scholars. And that remains today a crucial issue for the antipodean art historian. Despite local adulation, does one’s work possess critical weight on the world stage? Who grants that perception of scholarly value? Or, when the gaze is reversed, what is one’s work that is based in Europe and highly praised abroad, but ignored in Australia, worth to the discipline from an antipodean perspective? These are troubling questions, with ever increasing ‘national priorities’ looming. My view is that Smith could not contemplate his death without offering work that was central to the field that had evinced hateful superiority from Blunt when he met him in 1948. That late ‘global reassertion’ by Smith, to borrow an apt term from Peter Beilharz, disappointed many admirers of Smith’s earlier work. But having had a taste of the galling prejudice in England that left Smith bristling to prove his ability to contribute substantially to ‘their’ topics, I can understand why he made the antipodean choice to go down fighting. After all, he knew well that he had planted enough seeds at home to see gifted younger scholars develop ‘a historiography adequate to the post imperialist world’.

The Antipodean Perspective collection brings to light a number of previously understudied pieces of work by Smith and the contributors’ responses to them yields numerous fresh angles of approach to his thought. Perhaps we are nearing the time when it would be appropriate to gather a complete corpus of his publications and the commentaries on them. Then we may be able to see more clearly who Smith was to all of us, in his ‘beginnings and endings’.