Bernard Smith: A scholar who set the standard

BERNARD Smith's approach will continue to help demystify art.

Bernard Smith

BERNARD Smith, who died early this month at 94, was the first and, so far, the only great historian of Australian art. He was a figure to whom all who followed him are indebted, not only for the quality of his research and his historical interpretations but equally for the example he set and the standards he established for the field.

He was erudite and scholarly but avoided the academic trap of specialisation, where the wood so easily dissolves into a multitude of isolated trees; nor did he fall into the lazy art world assumption that everything that sold or was shown in approved galleries was good.

On the contrary, Smith always understood art as part of society. He knew that art had meanings, and meanings had consequences; he took an actively critical stance in relation to the contemporary art of his time, and this critical engagement was reflected in his work as a historian.

He had scathing words for the people who wrote about art in this country 50 years ago: their superficiality, ignorance, timidity and willingness to praise whatever was in fashion or promoted by the art market. Nothing has changed today, except the art establishment is far more extensive and its spruikers more numerous.

Smith, who grew up in modest circumstances in Melbourne, had the opportunity to work with great historians such as Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld and Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg, both institutes within the University of London. He published his first history of Australian art, Place, Taste and Tradition, in 1945. The most active centre of art in Australia during the war years was Melbourne, where the Contemporary Art Society had been split along lines already familiar to European modernism, namely between left-wing radicals and aesthetic avant-gardists. As a Marxist, Smith sympathised with the former, and in particular with their demand that art should address a broad public rather than become a chic pastime for initiates.

Accordingly, the last section of his book was very critical of surrealism and other avant-garde tendencies. But the post-war situation was soon radically changed with the evaporation of surrealism and the invasion of abstraction, first in its European and then its American varieties. The supporters of the new fashion maintained that it represented the consummation of the history of painting, and had nothing but scorn for the figurative painters of Melbourne's erstwhile avant-garde. In 1959, Smith helped organise, and wrote a manifesto for, an exhibition of figurative artists who gathered around the Antipodean banner.

The Antipodean protest was regarded as a reactionary, indeed almost reprehensible, gesture by the supporters of abstraction, which was destined to triumph for more than a decade before reaching a climax about 1968 and then burning out in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, Smith had written a completely new and more ambitious history, Australian Painting, which was published in 1962, and whose final section included a detailed discussion of the vogue for abstraction. When I was working on my own book on Australian art in the mid-90s, I was deeply struck by Smith's willingness, in each work, to engage critically, although patiently and subtly, with contemporary problems, even in the knowledge that anything written about one's own time could never claim to be as definitive as the account of an earlier period.

At the same time, Smith had been occupied with specialist research into the earliest art associated with the European exploration and colonisation of Australia, which was published in 1960 as European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850, an outstanding work of history and perhaps his most important as far as an international readership is concerned. This was followed by the three volumes of The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, which appeared between 1985 and 1987.

Smith published a collection of documents on early Australian art, as well as several volumes of essays and two of autobiography that have been widely discussed elsewhere. In 1998 he published another substantial historical work, Modernism's History, in which he maintained that we could not keep on using the term modernism for a movement in art that was roughly bounded by the years 1890 and 1960 or 1970; after all, for the past four or five centuries the term modern, with varying connotations, has simply meant what is going on now. The same difficulty has indeed arisen today with contemporary, which should refer to an even narrower aperture of now but has come to mean a particular and officially approved style.

In any case, Smith suggested the term modernism be replaced by a more specific period label, thus freeing it to continue travelling through time, denoting the now of successive ages. His suggestion was formalesque, since so much of modernism was concerned with the formalist aesthetic values this term suggests: its "immanent drive", as Smith suggested, "was towards abstraction". So far the proposal has not been taken up, but more important than the name itself is the principle of establishing a distinction between period style and historical age, and thus assigning historical boundaries to a movement that liked to present itself, in millenarian terms, as the end of art history. Smith's critical approach to history will continue, in coming years, to contribute to a much-needed reappraisal and demystification of the art of the 20th century.

Christopher Allen is national art critic of The Australian and author of Art in Australia from Colonization to Postmodernism (London, Thames & Hudson, 1997).