BIOGRAPHY
Hegel's Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith
SHERIDAN PALMER POWER PUBLICATIONS, $39.99
Bernard Smith is the greatest art historian Australia has ever produced. He is also the man whose magnum opus, European Vision and the South Pacific, is still regarded as a major turning point in the study of colonial exploration in the Pacific, its seminal influence acknowledged by no less an authority than Edward Said, who can seem to have originated our current post-colonial perspectives.
Smith also wrote a history of Australian painting that remains a classic, and worked tirelessly to promote - and to help shape - the study of art history in Australia.
He was born in Sydney in 1916 to an unmarried Irish servant woman. His father, an itinerant worker 30 years his mother's senior, was present at the birth but faded away soon after. Smith became a ward of the state and was fostered out to a cheerful working-class family in Sydney's inner west, a story told with unforgettable elan in his award-winning memoir, The Boy Adeudatus. 
His is the timeless story of a poor boy who made good.
Sheridan Palmer, herself an art historian and curator, has written a brisk but ample biography that, if it's sometimes a bit short on colour and character, strives to do justice to Smith's major intellectual achievements.
In its early stages, she puts heavy emphasis on his feelings of exclusion - as an adopted child - and the way this shadowed his attempt to navigate the historical storms and shipwrecks of colonialism and communism, romanticism and its denatured child modernism. Only someone with Smith's background, Palmer argues, could have latched onto a man such as William Hodges, the taciturn English painter who accompanied Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks on their epic second voyage to the Pacific, and whose proto-plein air paintings, more truthful in their untutored naturalism than any landscapes of the South Seas attempted before, failed to satisfy Georgian tastes.
"I am interested in artists as failures," wrote Smith.
"Hodges was a special kind of failure. The failure who is a forerunner we should, as art historians, pay more attention to."
To begin with, however, there had been artistic ambitions. At school, Smith made clever but rude caricatures as a way of sucking up to the class bullies. Smith always had a kind of shrewdness about him. But he also took pride in his drawings - although he later repented the cruelty they entailed.
He worked first as a primary-school teacher in country New South Wales, then as an education officer at the National Art Gallery of NSW. And all the while he continued to paint. He was drawn to surrealism, painting dark allegorical scenes, crudely configured but redolent with the menace of war.
Smith believed his art was "too far advanced both in form and content to be understood by an Australian audience". His friends declared that an audience would have to be created, so, laying down his brushes, Smith decided to become an art critic, and work at the other end of the production line.
So he, too, was a forerunner and a failure, although it resulted in quite brilliant success. As Palmer says, Smith's transformation from bush schoolmaster and obscure painter into one of Australia's most brilliant academic art scholars as well as a superb shirt-sleeves critic had a youthful dazzle that his later professorial eminence tends to obscure.
His first ascension culminated in Place Taste and Tradition in 1945, a socio-economic analysis of Australian art from its colonial and scientific beginnings to the on-rush of the modern movement.
It was a landmark work of art history. There's a strong case for saying it's the first fully articulated work of Marxist art criticism, and it's also where the term "postmodernism" was first coined. It not only spawned a generation of art historians, it made possible Robert Hughes' The Art of Australia, which relied quite a bit on the ground Smith had uncovered. Smith would update the book with the now standard textbook, Australian Painting.
It was due to the success of Place Taste and Tradition, that Smith, still without a degree, got his scholarship to study in London at the Courtauld and the Warburg institutes (during the heyday of Gombrich and Panofsky). There he laid the groundwork for his great work on the Pacific.
It was the best possible academic laboratory for one of the great intellectual and scholarly figures this country has produced.
Palmer has one great advantage in this biography. She's the author of Centre of the Periphery: Three European Art Historians in Melbourne, a book on the refugee art historians Ursula Hoff and Franz Philipp and the Englishman Joe Burke, founder of the fine arts department at the University of Melbourne. And it's a book Smith very much admired.
There's a sense in which he was rescued by Burke. How typical of Australia that in 1952, although he had studied at the most highly regarded art institute in the world and had written a bestselling book on the history of Australian art, he was informed that he was obliged to go back to teaching in the bush. Instead, he took a job in Burke's fledgling department.
His brief was to promote the appreciation of art not only in the university but in the wider community.
And it was in Melbourne that he convened the group of painters known as the Antipodeans - including Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh. As rich a roll call of the notable stay-at-home Australian painters as you could dream of.
He recognised the extent to which Australian culture was influenced first by Europe and then by America, but always believed this did not imply dependence or slavish trend following. Smith was well ahead of the game when he asserted that the margins could be just as interesting as the great metropolitan centres.
In many ways Hegel's Owl is closer to an intellectual biography than a fully realised portrait. Still, it's hard not to wonder if Palmer hasn't overstated the extent of Hegel's place in Smith's intellectual firmament. But - perhaps she's right. He was the greatest of Australian Marxists, and early Marx, the most artistically nuanced Marx, had one foot in Hegel.
I worked as a researcher for him almost until his death in 2011, and I seem to remember that he kept a small bust of Hegel in his study, along with a portrait of William Morris.
When asked about the bust, he would inevitably repeat Hegel's famous dictum: the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. Certainly, Palmer, who makes this her epigraph, is right to stress that Smith believed true historical understanding is always belated. It's the afterthought that discloses truth, the twilight of an age rather than its dawn.
Smith's commitment to the profession of art historian even well into his 10th prodigious decade was a revelation to me. Yet nothing was more impressive about him than his commitment to the growth and development of Australian culture.
Yes, he could be jealous of his own achievements, and his spirited tendency to stick up for himself made him an easy target.
But still - the pride that stares back at us from the Albert Tucker portrait had its justifications.
And anyone who knew Bernard knew that it went along with the sweetest and deepest kind of modesty.