The Legacies of Bernard Smith

Edited by Jaynie Anderson, Christopher R. Marshall and Andrew Yip

Winner of the 2017 AAANZ Best Anthology Prize

An international field of scholars from art history, anthropology, history and literature, as well as curators and writers, explore the impact and legacy of Australia’s most revered art historian.

It has been widely asserted that Bernard Smith established the discipline of art history in Australia. He was the founding professor of contemporary art and the directory of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, published the classic art text Australian Painting, three volumes on the art of Captain Cook’s voyages, and two memoirs. This publication brings together international academics from a range of disciplines to focus on everything Smith left his mark on, from Antipodean and European ‘envisioning’ of the Pacific; the definition of Australian art, gallery scholarship and public art education; museological practice and art criticism to Australian art biography and local heritage.

Contributors

Jaynie Anderson; Andrew Sayers; Robert W. Gaston; Nicholas Thomas; Rüdiger Joppien; Kathleen Davidson; Terry Smith; Peter Beilharz; Catherine Speck; Paul Giles; Simon Pierse; John Clark; Steven Miller; Joanna Mendelssohn; Christopher R. Marshall; Jim Berryman; Ann Stephen; Max Solling; Kate Challis; Sheridan Palmer; Catherine De Lorenzo; Ian McLean.

In The Legacies of Bernard Smith, you will also find chapters reflecting on his time as a grassroots activist in the Sydney suburb of Glebe, as a collector who believed in a common responsibility to support the arts by purchasing new work, and as a public intellectual facing up to the consequences of colonial violence. The collection [is] eclectic, but could it be otherwise?
—Andrew Fuhrmann, reviewed in Australian Book Review

ISBN 978-0994306432
372 pages
Paperback
24-page colour images