Introduction
I would like to begin by paying tribute to two curators of Queensland art. In 1985, Nancy Underhill put on ‘Queensland Works 1950–1985’ at the Art Museum of this University. It was intended as the successor to Vida Lahey’s groundbreaking 1959 publication Art in Queensland 1859–1959. In 2009, David Pestorius put on ‘Queensland Art 2009’at his gallery in Brisbane, which for its part was intended both to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lahey’s book and to follow on from Underhill’s exhibition. What is raised by all three projects is not only the usually excluded place of Queensland in histories of Australian art, but the question of what constitutes Queensland art, what does and does not belong to a history of the art of this State.
These questions were running through my mind when I heard of the death in September this year [2011] of Bernard Smith at the age of ninety-four. For I knew very well that he had delivered two lectures, indeed, one of the most important lectures of his life, ‘The Myth of Isolation’, here at the University of Queensland in 1961, exactly fifty years prior. The University of Queensland Press had even published the two lectures together as Australian Painting Todayin 1962. It was strange to think that an art historian who was so involved with the long-running artistic rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne—which is in part the subject of the second of his two lectures, ‘The Rebirth of Australian Painting’—had had a major moment up here in Queensland so long ago. It went against the popular image, which that book by Lahey and those exhibitions by Underhill and Pestorius do so much... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Bernard Smith, c. 1957.
