AustLit

'A new book on the seminal Australian art historian Bernard Smith recognises that he remains one of the most interesting figures in Australian art history. Antipodean Perspective, edited by Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer, is a guided tour of Bernard Smith’s persistent, fine-grained, analytical and expert accounts of art and its cultures. Born in 1916, Smith ascended from a bleak beginning to the pinnacle of art history scholarship in Australia. In 1955 he became a lecturer at the University of Melbourne and in 1967 he became director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts in Sydney. This text traverses Smith’s major contributions to the field during his long academic life. In it, 28 leading scholars and artists supplement carefully chosen excerpts from Smith’s books, papers, speeches, autobiography and manifesto with passages that explain how his writing influenced the course of their own thoughts and speculate on what his passages on art represent today.'