Bernard Smith biography
Bernard Smith was born in 1916 and began teaching at a one-teacher school in southern New South Wales between 1936 and 1939. During his years at the Sydney Teachers College (1936-38) he was inspired by May Marsden, a much-admired art teacher at the college. In his time at the Murraguldrie State Forest he drew and painted in watercolours and on his return to Sydney in 1939 studied briefly at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney and established the Teachers Federation Arts Society, which developed a fortnightly series about art and its history. These lectures, to his surprise, attracted not only local art teachers but many artists and art historians who had recently migrated to Australia as a part of the Jewish diaspra promoted by Hitler’s then mastery of Europe.
It was one of these migrants, Dr George Berger, a pupil of Gosef Strizowski of the University of Vienna, who helped him to organise a fortnightly series of lectures in art history entitled ‘The Art of Today and Yesterday’ in 1941, most probably the first series of lectures of this kind in Australia. In 1944, Smith was seconded from Enmore Activity School, to develop a scheme by which paintings in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales could be sent to regional centres throughout the state. As there were few if any modern paintings in the collection, he borrowed many from local artists and collectors. It was because of this work that he was awarded a British Council scholarship that enabled him to study art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art under Professor Antony Blunt and also at the Warburg Institute under Charles Mitchell.
Upon returning to Australia, he completed a PhD on Art and the Pacific under Professor J. Davidson, and was also offered a post at the recently established department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. This department was established as a result of the philanthropy of Sir Keith Murdoch, editor of the Herald newspaper in Melbourne. Sir Joseph Burke was appointed as the founding head of the department and Smith, after completing his PhD, joined it in 1956. The lectures presented here are the product of his teaching in the department between 1956 and 1966.
Smith has travelled widely and throughout the world in Europe, Russia, Japan, China, South Africa, Mexico, Canada and the United States to visit art galleries and buildings of architectural interest, but he has spent most of his life writing in Sydney, Canberra or Melbourne.
These lectures are presented here as they were originally written, the only corrections being concerned with dates, misspellings and solecisms. That is to say, they are archival in nature and no attempt has been made to bring them up-to-date. They belong to their time.