Antipodean Perspective (Selected Writings of Bernard Smith)

Bernard Smith (1916–2011) was undoubtedly Australia’s greatest art historian and arguably Australia’s most important humanist scholar. 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 broader 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.