BERNARD SMITH, COLD WARRIOR

Heather Barker and Charles Green

Abstract: Bernard Smith’s canonical book, Australian Painting 1788–1960, was shaped

by the Cold War, and this forced the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a

trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades. More than art history

determined Smith’s innovations. This paper proceeds from that obvious but easily

overlooked point, that Smith and his book were deeply conditioned by the intellectual

climate of Cold War Australia. The appearance of Smith’s book and, henceforth,

Australian art history’s concerns with postcoloniality and anxiety about nationality derive

from this. Smith’s particular Cold War shaped Australian art history ever since.

Keywords: Bernard Smith • Australian art history • postcolonialism • cold war • criticism

Introduction

Bernard Smith’s canonical book, Australian Painting 1788–1960 (Smith 1962), was shaped by the imprint of the Cold War, and this forced the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades, a direction that continued in the 1980s’ and then 1990s’ emphasis on the ideologies of appropriation. This, more than art history determined

Smith’s innovations, though this is too-easily forgotten by a young, local art history anxious about more than influence. Anxious, instead, about its autonomy. This paper proceeds from that obvious but easily overlooked point, that Bernard Smith and his book, Australian Painting 1788-1960 were

© Copyright Charles Green and Heather Barker 2005 A version of this essay appeared as: Green, C. & Barker, H. (2005). “Bernard Smith, Cold Warrior,” Thesis 11, number 82 (August 2005), 38-53. http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/82/1/38

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deeply conditioned by the intellectual climate of Cold War Australia. The appearance of Smith’s book and, henceforth, the Australian art history discipline’s concerns with postcoloniality and anxiety about nationality derive in no small part from this. The essay concludes that Smith’s particular Cold War has shaped the terms of art history ever since. Later art critical developments— including Australian theorisations about the two-way radial trajectory of postmodernism—were watermarked by the extra-artistic dynamic of the Cold War.

Art history in Europe and North America has changed since the height of the Cold War, when

Australian Painting 1788-1960 appeared, and Australian art historians now normally take into account new feminisms, postcolonialisms and postmodernisms. All of these, we habitually suppose, postdate the intellectual climate of the early 1960s. A postcolonial perspective alone, though, is of questionable assistance in itself to understanding both writing and art that wishes to inscribe a truly global perspective onto the provincialism of both mainstream and regional art history, terms that were deeply inscribed by the Cold War.

In his gargantuan book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change

(Collins 1999), Randall Collins argues that the work of establishing new ideas is done in speech and writing directed at other people: in face-to-face argument, seminars, lectures, all the types of publication, letters, journal articles, texts.

The same is true of art: the work of new art and art criticism is carried on in discourse and in the exhibition of art as well as in the studio: in face-to-face argument, lectures, art magazines, catalogues, reviews, in patronage, art museum collections and in the performance and installation of art. This collides with the notion of the artist or the art writer as a wholly self-propelling, isolated figure, and with the notion of art history as driven by artistic innovation even if influenced in timbre and structure by its social context. 3

We can further extend Collin’s observations about philosopher