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
to that time. 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 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.
