The Writings of Bernard Smith

Edited by John Spencer and Peter Wright

The Writings of Bernard Smith: Bibliography 1938-1998, documenting sixty years of art historian Bernard Smith's prolific output, is a valuable reference tool for researchers, scholars and students of Australian art and art history. For art historians in Australia, especially of Australian art, Bernard Smith is the benchmark. No other writer on art in this country can match the totality of his range, depth and sheer output. Outstanding among the founders of the discipline in Australia, he remains its most distinguished practitioner. As an art historian he set out, in Place, Taste and Tradition, the first systematic history of art in Australia, and achieved, in European Vision and the South Pacific, what would now be called a postcolonial study of visual cultures at their limits. He is also to be valued for his conformities to, and variations within, Marxist art history; his canonical works, such as Australian Painting; and his incorporation into art history of some of the priorities of art criticism, including a responsibility for sustaining informed public discourse about the visual arts.

69 pages, paperback.