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Bernard Smith began life as a ward of the State; he would go on to become the father of Australian art history. In 2008, Smith invited writer and art historian Sheridan Palmer to write his biography. Through years of interviews and exclusive access to Smith's papers and library, Palmer reveals the unique character of an exceptional man.
Smith's scrutiny of the pictorial and documentary evidence results in some surprising findings. He argues that the obligation science placed on art to provide information was a factor in the triumph of Impressionism during the late nineteenth century. He points out, for example, that William Hodges, Cook's official artist on his second voyage to the Pacific, was one of the first artists to adopt plein-air methods of painting. Describing the impact of the Pacific world on burgeoning English Romanticism, Smith tells of the crucial influence of Cook's astronomer, William Wales, on S.T. Coleridge's imaginative development. He describes how John Webber's apparently documentary art was fashioned to suit political concerns. He examines critically the relevance of Edward Said's Orientalism for our understanding of European perceptions of the Pacific
Following art historian Bernard Smith's award-winning autobiographical account of his earlier life ("The Boy Adeodatus: the portrait of a lucky young bastard", first published in 1984) he now reflects on life in the 1940s. Themes recalling the period before the family departed for England in September 1948 include; courtship and marriage; forebodings of war and attitudes to Communism and Fascism; political involvement in cultural activities with artists and emigre European-trained art historians anxious to promote modern art and knowledge of art history (not taught in universities at that time) and early employment at the Art Gallery of New South Wales pioneering the arrangement of travellin...
Encompassing movements from post-impressionism to post-modernism, eminent and widely published art historian Bernard Smith has written a sweeping history, a reformulation of art history in the twentieth century.
""Someone really should make a movie of this story. It's better than most of the scripts I see."" Jacqui Gray, actress ""I loved Know Your Place and was especially enthralled by the nerve-jangling crescendo. Can't wait for the sequel!"" Helen Alexander ""A fast-paced tale of paranoia and vengeance in modern London. A promising first novel."" Andy Sibley ""This is a captivating book, taut with suspense and unfolding drama. Impossible to put down."" Sally WhitearIt was a humdrum kind of life ... polishing City boys' shoes by day, and counting the meagre pennies by nigh.
No composer contributed more to film than Bernard Herrmann, who in over 40 scores enriched the work of such directors as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, and Martin Scorsese. In this first major biography of the composer, Steven C. Smith explores the interrelationships between Herrmann's music and his turbulent personal life, using much previously unpublished information to illustrate Herrmann's often outrageous behavior, his working methods, and why his music has had such lasting impact. From his first film (Citizen Kane) to his last (Taxi Driver), Herrmann was a master of evoking psychological nuance and dramatic tension through music, often using unheard-of instrumental...
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.
A practical reference guide to help teachers to predict and understand the problems their students have.
Bernard Smith (1916-2011) was arguably Australia's greatest art historian and one of the most important humanist thinkers internationally on ideas concerning cultural contact. His European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960, showed how the ideas of the Enlightenment and the empirical structuring of scientific and geographical knowledge during the great eighteenth-century voyages of discovery affected notions of identity-both for Europeans and the Indigenous peoples with whom they came in contact. Not only did Smith's investigation of art, science and imperialism of this period explore the conditions of frontier contact, it opened up the dialogue on de-colonisation and allowed us 'to think beyond or after it'. He was undoubtedly a pioneer of post-colonialism and the book remains 'a lighthouse' in pacific studies.