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The Lone Antipodean

Bernard Smith’s Post-War Modernism

Sheridan Palmer
Eyeline 78/79
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Modernism, or ‘the modern movement’ as it was called in the early to mid part of the twentieth century, was Bernard Smith’s period. Born in 1916, Smith—regarded as the father of Australian art history—matured during the late 1930s and 1940s, just after modernism peaked and it remained a vital phase in his life and work; as he said, ‘I lived through it. I saw it happening’.1 Moreover, he knew and wrote about many of the Australian artists who belonged to this Modernist phase, and remained one of its most astute critics. 

Yet while Smith argued that history and all art is at one time modern or contemporary—a phrase he borrowed from Benedetto Croce’s ‘all history is contemporary’—he also considered modernism a critique of Modernity, and Modernity a ‘slab of history … [with] no meaningful end …’, thereby endowing it conceptual eternity.2 Eventually, however, he decided it was his job to periodise Modernism as the culture of the twentieth century, ‘and how it is to be understood historically’ as a series of stylistic movements that began in Europe and England around 1890, and ended as a globalised cultural mix in the mid to late 1960s. Only in its ‘high modernist decline’, the post-war phase, did Smith see trouble brewing in the arts, and that was with the incursion of abstraction, which he considered an adjunct of imperialism. This period in Australia embraced cultural and economic change particularly with American popular cultural and aesthetic values, and highlighted Australia’s new post-war internationalism as well as shaping its modern direction. Richard Haese points out that ‘Bernard Smith characterised Sydney’s cultural condition as an ambition to become a kind of south-western suburb of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Charles Blackman, The Antipodean Exhibition poster, 1959

Charles Blackman, The Antipodean Exhibition poster, 1959. Private collection. 

Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd and Mrs Blackman at the Recent Australian Painting exhibition private view, Whitechapel Gallery, 1961

Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd and Mrs Blackman at the Recent Australian Painting exhibition private view, Whitechapel Gallery, 1961. Photograph by Kerry Dundas. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive.