Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was unquestionably one of Australia’s greatest humanist scholars and its finest art historian.
His European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (1960) was a foundational text of post-colonialism, and in Australian Painting (1962) he set out the definitive history of Australian art.
Antipodean Perspective: The Selected Writings of Bernard Smith presents twenty-six art historians, curators, artists and critics, from Australia and overseas, who have chosen a text from Smith’s work, also reproduced in this book, and sought to explain its personal and broad significance.
Their selections reveal Smith’s extraordinary range as a scholar, his profound grasp of this nation’s past, and the way his ideas have maintained their relevance as we face our future.
Rex Butler is an art historian who writes on Australian art and teaches in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University. Sheridan Palmer is an art historian, curator and author of the biography Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith.
Antipodean Perspective: The Selected Writings of Bernard Smith is published by Monash University Publishing and available from all good book retailers including Booktopia.
Image: Antipodean Perspective: The Selected Writings of Bernard Smith (supplied)