Cirrus@Austlit

Bernard Smith was born in Sydney and educated at the University of Sydney, the Warburg Institute, the University of London and the Australian National University. He worked as a school teacher (1935-1944), and was appointed Education Officer at the New South Wales Art Gallery in 1944. During the 1960s he served a two year term as Reader in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before moving to Sydney as Power Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Sydney in 1967.

From the 1940s onward, Smith wrote many articles and books on Australian art, concentrating on the Pacific region and including several books on the art of Captain Cook's voyages. His work includes the influential Place Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (1945). In 1984 he published The Boy Adeodatus, an account of his life to the age of twenty-four. The autobiography was well-received, winning a number of prizes, including the National Book Council Award. Smith's poems, most written in the 1940s were collected in Poems 1938-1992 (1996). Sections of Smith's second autobiography have been published in Meanjin.

Following his retirement in 1977, Smith returned to Melbourne where he continued to write, lecture and mentor. He remained a professorial fellow at The University of Melbourne until his death at Sumner House, an aged care facility in Fitzroy, Melbourne.

In 2018, Monash University Publishing released a collection of Bernard Smith's writings on art, edited by Rex Butler: Antipodean Perspectives: Selected Writings of Bernard Smith.