AustLit

'In February 2020 The Recent Past: Writing Australian Art 1958–2020, the first collection of writings by Daniel Thomas, edited by myself and Steven Miller, will be published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Thomas, now 88 years old, occupies a singular position in Australian letters, one of the greatest writers of Australian art history whose contribution has not been in writing the requisite heavy tome ondensing our rag-tag and often achronological cultural history, but in hundreds of reviews, articles, essays and catalogue entries, and several (modest) books. The peculiarity of his reputation is that where he is regarded—with great affection—as a colossus in our intellectual heritage by those “in the know,” he is little known by the generations of the 21st century, and, indeed, by the general public whom he has spent his life serving. Thomas’s life’s work is so inimical to our cultural and institutional assumptions that the body of it exists not so much within the writing itself—millions and millions of marvellous words— but within what we take as the natural inheritance of our shared knowledge. His is the moving hand of Australian art history: trying to describe it, to pin it down, is like trying to describe the construction of a perfect garment by examining its tucks and seams and hand-rolled hems—to explain it from the inside out.' (Introduction)