Clio's Lives
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Smith’s promotion of antipodeanism declared a distinctive aesthetic while
simultaneously asserting a national autonomy. As he said, ‘[i]t is natural
that we should see and experience nature differently in some degree from
artists of the northern hemisphere’.56 Moeover, by establishing a regionalist,
figurative style – Smith preferred calling it ‘being oneself [or] standing
on one’s feet’ – in opposition to international abstraction, Australian
artists might have a chance of being noticed. Aesthetic individualism was
important, but it was also about challenging the political giants and their
cultural supremacy – though at the time he did not present it to the artists
as such. In retrospect, he explained that the exhibition and Manifesto
were ‘not at bottom an attack on abstract art; it [wa]s an attack on the
56 ‘The Antipodean Manifesto’, published in The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976), 197.
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policy of the State Department of the USA to use abstract art as a political
instrument in opposition to the Soviet Union’s use of socialist realism as
a political instrument’.57 Given the Cold War tensions in the late 1950s,
Bernard Smith’s obsession with power relations and dominant cultures
was understandable, but it also reflected his hostility to anything that
‘subordinated ideas or relations of exchange’. The price of survival had
always interested him, whether that of the convict, the destitute, the state
ward, Aborigines or the marginalised individual or artist – it resonated
deeply with his outsider self.
The Antipodeans exhibition was an enormous success and consolidated
the seven artists’ professional reputations, yet it also became one of the
most divisive events in the history of the Australian art world. Not only
had it politicised art but it reignited antagonism between Melbourne and
Sydney artists and provoked rivalry between the ‘abs’ and the ‘figs’ – Smith
was accused of derailing abstraction and tying figurative art to the tracks
and holding it ransom. Others like Helen Brack objected to the ‘genius’
factor that positioned one artist above another or, more specifically, one
group above all others.58 In this, Bernard Smith’s Marxism and egalitarian
beliefs had faltered and his selection of the artists was seen as elitist; his
own defence was that he had chosen them for their political neutrality and
distinctive Antipodean content. In Barbara Blackman’s view, however,
the exhibition was ‘an irrefutable landmark in Australian art’:
Where tradition is wanting, certain prejudices and preconceptions may
also be lacking. The Antipodeans made their gesture from necessity and
out of direct experience and so have helped to shape the present particular
contours of our art, a distinctive and virile growth alongside the modern
art of other countries.59
The periphery versus the centre
While Bernard Smith did all he could to get the Antipodeans exhibition to
London, he was stymied by the local antagonism of artists towards him,
as well as by the British establishment and its cultural elites exemplified by
Sir Kenneth Clark and Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel
57 Bernard Smith, cited in Beilharz, Imagining the Antipodes, 117.
58 I am grateful to Helen Brack, who was closely associated with the entire development of the Antipodeans exhibition, for discussing Bernard’s authority in determining the exhibition and its controversial Manifesto.
59 Barbara Blackman, ‘The Antipodean Affair’, Art and Australia, 5:4 (1968), 607–16.
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Gallery in London. Robertson had been developing a large exhibition of
Australia’s best contemporary artists, including the Antipodeans, and this
was held in 1961 at the Whitechapel Gallery. To add insult to injury,
Robertson bypassed Smith as a major critic of Australian art and invited
the young Sydney architecture student and flamboyant art critic Robert
Hughes to write the catalogue essay for the exhibition.
In the introductory essays, Clark and Robertson stressed that Australian
culture had been moulded by isolation and the country was seen as
a major food bowl producer in which the ‘redundant poor’ had been
replaced by ‘sun bronzed sheep farmers’.60 The stigma of the ‘working
man’s paradise’ remained firmly rooted in the European psyche and the
spinning of the myth was too irresistible for these cultured Englishmen,
whose attitudes were diametrically opposed to Smith’s. Robertson’s
colourful rhetoric emphasised the country’s vast landscapes, immense
distances and a heightened sense of isolation:
A friction in the air itself finds expression in the edge and bite which
underlies [its] art. A fierce, tough, often rather slangy imagery is invariably
described in the most tender and loving manner … [but] the imagery
itself, cut off from our European environment, is highly inventive and
has one unifying factor: an unremitting sense of the drama of the isolated
moment.61
He also claimed that ‘[a] nation based on an idea rather than on blood
needs some transcendent image to reveal itself’. In a veiled reference
to Smith, Robertson wrote:
Power politics have made nationalism a dirty word … Australian artists
… are at once passionately interested in what is Australian art and highly
suspicious of the answer. At the same time, these problems do not concern
the painters as much as critics and interpreters for who the painters feel
mostly a proper and essential distrust.62
Hughes also parodied Smith, ‘some things I am told, can only be seen
clearly from a considerable distance’ and that ‘exoticism depends on
where you stand’.63 With his superb cast of phrase, Hughes continued,
‘The first convict settlement was made here [Australia] in 1788. In the
60 Bryan Robertson, Recent Australian Painting (Whitechapel Art Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 1961).
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Robert Hughes, in ibid., 13.
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next few years, a cultural transplantation took place. But though you can
ship works of art, you cannot put a climate of thought in a crate’. As he
proceeded to decipher the past, uproot its traditions and uncover Bernard
Smith’s political mask, referring to him as a ‘critic’ who had ‘evolved’ an
Australian mythology, Hughes took aim:
Recently an ‘opposition group’ was formed in Melbourne under
the leadership of the distinguished art historian Bernard Smith. His
programmic intent was clear. Australia he argued lacks a tradition of art
but possesses strong social traditions. It has acquired its own myths, heroes
and white man’s folklore. If the artist, then, is to function as an effective
social unit his art must reflect this and draw its inspiration from it …
The Antipodean notion of an image seems to concern a pressure point
for a number of beliefs … which need have nothing to do with aesthetic
sensation or the ex
istence of the object itself. It is an art of association.
Under this aspect, an image is the firing pin and not the grenade.64
Smith, however, was not to be marginalised and took his revenge.
In the John Murtagh Macrossan Memorial Lectures, which Bernard
Smith titled ‘The Myth of Isolation’ and ‘The Rebirth of Australian
Painting’ given at the University of Queensland in 1961,65 he asserted that
while there was ‘some core truth at the heart of any myth’, Australia had
never suffered from cultural isolation, from neither Europe’s Renaissance
nor its modernist movement.66 As a young pastoral society, its cultural
identity had been formed upon a Eurocentric philosophical and cultural
inheritance, and what had been brought to the colony was adapted,
modified or changed by the geographic, climatic and developing social
conditions, not formed under isolation. During the 1950s and 1960s,
as in the late 1940s, the reception of Australians in London was usually
simplistic, being seen more often as the poor, uncultured cousins from
behind the black stump.67 The London critic John Douglas Pringle, who
had lived and worked in Sydney, understood how the British tended
to misread Australia as a distant, inhospitable land of mythological
proportions; he began his review of the Whitechapel exhibition tongue
in cheek:
64 Ibid., 19–20.
65 The John Murtagh Macrossan lectures were published as Australian Painting Today (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1962).
66 Smith, ‘The Myth of Isolation’, 16.
67 Sheridan Palmer, ‘The Lone Antipodean – Bernard Smith’s Post-War Modernism’, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts Magazine (Brisbane), 78/79 (2013), 55.
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Many people in this country must imagine that contemporary Australian
painting is a rather exotic art form discovered by Sidney Nolan in a cave
near Alice Springs, round about the year 1940, and since handed on –
under oath of secrecy sealed in wallaby blood – to Albert Tucker and
Arthur Boyd.68
While Australia’s cultural character had been carved out from its dominant
European beginnings, Bernard Smith stressed that a culture on the
periphery was able to develop in more vital ways precisely because it was
less hampered by the ever prevalent ‘graveyard of memory’ or the heavy
hand of European cultural traditions evident in major northern centres
such as Paris, London and New York. Australian cultural identity was not
inferior or forged through provincial isolation, but lay in its democratic
difference.
The Macrossan lectures, though reaching only a small audience, were
a brilliant riposte to those British who still clung to the notion of
Australia as a colonial appendage. Bernard Smith also refuted their
image of Australian art as some exotic, crude imitation of Europe’s great
painters, and accused them of having ‘disastrously misrepresented modern
Australian artists’ as ‘white noble savages’. These English values, Smith
felt, were deeply entrenched and maintained by their imperial distance
and cultural elitism.
Bernard Smith’s willingness to ‘stand alone’ and question cultural
hegemony gave him a reputation as a critical interventionist and a vitally
important intellectual at a time when Australia’s modern cultural identity
was in a major developmental phase. His Antipodean discourse, though
seen by some as inhibiting, was critical to artists as they aesthetically
defined themselves during the Cold War and in an increasingly globalised
world. Later he wrote, ‘Distance is our longue durée, the near constant
factor in our history, that does so much to transform our art – and if we
are creative and intelligent we can put it to our advantage’.69
68 John Douglas Pringle, ‘The Australian Painter’, Observer (London), 4 June 1961. Pringle was a well-informed and brilliant editor who lived and worked in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
69 Bernard Smith, opening address at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, 16 April 1984, for the exhibition
‘Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires’, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS 8680.
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Bernard Smith, 1978
Source: Bernard Smith Papers, National Library of Australia (photographer unknown) .
For much of the remaining twentieth century, Smith’s polemics on cultural
identity and traditional inheritances set a benchmark for Australian critics
and art historians, but his influence extended well beyond them to other
disciplines such as anthropology, Pacific and cross-cultural studies, and
artists working nationally and internationally. If European Vision and the
South Pacific had established him as a major revisionist – one art critic
considered it ‘one of those mind-changing works which truly extend not
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just knowledge but the frame-work in which to place that knowledge’70
– then his epic vision of Australia’s cultural condition and his theories of
contact, exchange and identity, together with his ability to steer a critical
course through vast historical terrains, mark him as one of this country’s
most brilliant and pioneering intellectuals.
Indeed, European Vision and the South Pacific predated Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978) by almost 20 years. For Smith, Australian artists
mattered and he was emphatic that they deserved to be recognised
internationally. On this he was prepared to stake his professional reputation
and fight at the barricades of modernism and challenge the metropolitan
systems of cultural elitism. Even when his peers and intellectual children
considered him anachronistic, he remained a vital figure in Australia’s
cultural modernisation.
As a Marxist utopian, Bernard Smith believed in the future and found
generational change exciting; it helped him absorb the zeitgeist of the day,
which in turn helped him define his arguments and redefine his identity
amongst the next generation of Australian art and cultural historians.
In this, he was determined to maintain a visible and intellectual presence
well into his old age, even if it meant being overtly provocative. In 2002,
aged 86, Smith posed naked for the artist Carmel O’Connor’s Archibald
Prize portrait. The reclining, unclothed image of the father of Australian
art history was deliberately designed to shake up bourgeois complacency,
challenge the uncritical Australian culture and address the demise of
figurative art. Smith insisted that his pose be constructed on the classical
Roman sculpture known as the Barbarini Faun, or The Sleeping Satyr,
which enabled him to incorporate complex connections and mythical
metaphors. The faun or satyr was considered as representing the mythic
messenger of man’s origins, and Bernard Smith had always been interested
in origins.71 Moreover, the portrait was a final ‘identity performance’ with
the aged and eminent art historian unashamedly parading as the emperor
with no clothes and imparting his lesson aimed at the crisis of identity
in the postmodern age.
70 Charles Nodrum, ‘Bernard Smith and the Formalesque’, unpublished article, courtesy of Charles Nodrum.
71 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; and, the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 52.
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What was important to Bernard Smith was to keep the dialogue open
and arguments on traditional and contemporary art moving. He saw his
role as reinvigorating the cultural debate, and in this his conscientious
criticism was inescapable, even when attempts to dislodge him from his
prominent position in Australian art history were made. So influential
was his published work and extensive criticism that other art historians
found it impossible not to use it as their matrix upon which to formulate
their own theories of centre and periphery or metropolitan power and
provincialism. Smith’s critiques of cultural hegemony were adopted,
interrogated and reconstructed by younger art historians and sociologists
during the latter part of the twentieth century, which repositioned him at
the core of a new plateau of revisionism and discourse on contemporary
identity.72 In particular, the neo-Marxists Ian Burn and Terry Smith
appropriated the issue of provincialism in the 1970s and 1980s, and in
the early 1980s the young art critic Paul Taylor and his colleague Paul Foss
‘channelled’ Bernard Smith’s early theories of cultural imperialism and the
importance, or unimportance, of locality. As the Australian art world’s
eminence grise, Bernard Smith was the benchmark and, as the art historian
Rex Butler more recently claimed, we should continue to ‘turn to the true
precursor of revisionism’ and the originator of ‘the great Australian idea’
of antipodal inversion or ‘reversal to the rest of the world.’73
Bernard Smith questioned the Antipodean psyche and gave it significant
cultural form as well as proclaiming its place in a globalised world. His
intellectual and aesthetic landscape was vast, Antipodean, Eurocentric
and universal, and he traversed these terrains confidently. It was cultural
evolution that propelled his curiosity, for through culture it was possible
to understand the socioeconomic and political mechanisms attached
to power, and these were vital to his self-actualisation; it is what drove