Hegel’s Owl: Life of Bernard Smith, father of Australian art history

Bernard Smith, rightly considered the father of Australian art history, was born an outsider.

Art historian Bernard Smith pictured in 1950.

The historian, like the critic or the anthropologist, sees from the outside a world that remains largely invisible to those inside it. Such an external vantage point may be achieved in different ways, from expatriation or exile to the more subtle and intimate displacements of perspective that come from marginality, loss of social status, or even deep experience of the cultures of other times and places.

Bernard Smith (1916-2011), rightly considered the father of Australian art history, was born an outsider. He was the illegitimate issue of a casual encounter between an almost illiterate Irish servant girl and a feckless travelling ­labourer who was twice her age. The girl could not care for the child, so he became a ward of the state. Fortunately he was brought up in a foster home rather than a state institution, so he had at least some experience of the warmth of a family, though perhaps not enough to make him, in later life, a particularly good father.

As so often in earlier generations, schoolteaching became a path to social and professional advancement. Training took place at a teachers college, not a university, yet was far more demanding than the worthless undergraduate courses now mass-produced by universities. Smith had to write a substantial literary thesis at the conclusion of his course, and even then did not expect that he would reach what were then the higher intellectual ­altitudes of university until the opportunity became available to him through the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training scheme after the war in 1946.

In the meantime he was a wide reader and to some extent an autodidact, particularly drawn to a philosophical view of culture and history and, in that generation, inevitably a Marxist perspective. He was a member of the Communist Party for many years, until, to his credit, he resigned from it in 1950 after witnessing life in the workers’ paradise. Far too many intellectuals remained staunchly in denial until or even after the events in Paris and Prague in 1968, the beginnings of an end that finally came with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Even as a teacher he began writing and lecturing about art, and by 1944 he had secured a secondment from the Education Department as education officer at the Art Gallery of NSW, where he organised an ambitious program of touring exhibitions. At the same time he was writing his first book on the history of art in Australia, Place, Taste and Tradition (1945). When he began to attend the University of Sydney the following year, he had the good fortune to study with Dale Trendall, one of the world’s greatest authorities on ancient Greek vases.

It was from Trendall that Smith learned the principles of connoisseurship and of scholarly method in art history, and within two years — without having yet completed his degree — he was awarded a British Council scholarship to study at the Courtauld Institute in London. Here he met the institute’s director Anthony Blunt, who moved him to the Warburg Institute, the home of many more great scholars, to pursue his work on the relation of early Australian art and British art of the same period. At the same time he was invited to work on a scholarly edition of James Cook’s journals, which eventually became the The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (1985).

Returning to Australia, he completed his undergraduate degree and then his doctoral thesis, published as European Vision and the South Pacific (1960). Meanwhile he began teaching in the University of Melbourne’s department of art history and, when the Power Institute was established with the bequest of John Wardell Power, Smith became the first Power professor at the University of Sydney (1967-77). In 1962, he published his second, more mature and more ambitious history of art in this country, Australian Painting 1788-1960.

Smith was always deeply aware of the questions entailed by the antipodean location of Australia, from the experience of encounter and discovery to the realities of distance and the ambivalent cultural relations of periphery and centre. Australians are in a sense inherently outsiders, whereas Americans, for example, have the illusion of always being inside their own self-sustaining reality.

Just as importantly, and partly because his underlying Marxism implied a broader social engagement beyond the self-serving subculture of the art world, Smith always maintained a critical perspective on contemporary art. Place, Taste and Tradition ends on a polemical note, defending realism against the surrealism of the avant-garde. In 1959, he was the driving force behind the Antipodeans exhibition, which asserted the importance of figuration against the current fashion for abstraction. His Australian Painting is similarly marked by critical engagement.

Sheridan Palmer’s Hegel’s Owl is well-researched and is useful not only as a biography of Smith but as a chapter in the intellectual history of Australia. Unfortunately the style is rather leaden, filled with jarring solecisms (misuse of scion, lacuna, recapitulation, extenuate and many other words) and numerous mistakes in French and Italian that could have been avoided with more careful editing. More worrying are details that make one doubt the author’s broader grasp of the subject, such as suggesting Noel Coward was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, quoting correspondence between Smith and Kenneth Clark without seeming to realise that the discussion is about the latter’s book Landscape into Art, or referring to Smith’s long view of art history as going back to the ‘‘Syrians’’.

So the book is not quite as enjoyable to read or as enlightening as the fulsome recommendations on the front and back covers would suggest. It remains, nonetheless, a balanced account of the strengths and weaknesses of a complex intellectual. We remain indebted to Smith for having introduced to Australian art history the scholarly standards expected of the modern discipline, but no less for having set the example of a practice of history that is informed both by a philosophical perspective and by serious and principled criticism.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic.

Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith

By Sheridan Palmer

Power Publications, 424pp, $39.95