Bernard Smith

This paper explores the origins and development of the public dialogue between Bernard Smith (1916-2011) and Robert Hughes (1938-2012). Smith and Hughes were giants of Australian art history of the twentieth century. Both, however, followed very different career paths: Smith’s readership was primarily academic and local, while Hughes’s audience was popular and international. And yet, despite these differences, a considerable amount of exchange existed between the two. After first locking horns in 1961, Smith and Hughes engaged in public debate intermittently for more than four decades. This dialogue, which transpired in the pages of published sources, especially their reviews and books, was characterised by acrimony and bitterness, as well as moments of conciliation and mutual respect. When contesting issues of common interest, both writers played to their natural strengths. Smith was dominant in the field of art history, while Hughes had the upper hand in art criticism. Each, however, encroached upon the other’s area of expertise: Smith wrote art criticism and Hughes wrote art history. Conflict was greatest in areas where their respective spheres of authority overlapped. Although tensions receded after 1964, when Hughes left Australia, they did not end. Key topics of debate included abstract art and modernism; provincialism and internationalism; and most importantly the vexed issue of Australian cultural isolation, which was defined in terms of Australian art and its relationship to European art history (or, as Smith termed it, ‘Renaissance tradition’).

The receipt of an intimate substance, implicates a materiality of the deep. The wine, a raw material and not material, is opened by the Philosophy of the Imaginary by Gaston Bachelard. An infinity cosmology begins by the essences, the meanings and the senses that belong to the absolutes archetypes of the inner. From this categories, flows a huge classification about the material imagination and material reveries. The Wine taste and sense, in the bachelardian perspective, are deep and nearly unconscious experiences. The unconscious appears in the color yet, between the bloody red and golden liquid, the unconscious supports the shaping alchemy of the sense. An alchemy, that isn’t looking for the grape harvest but that is seeking about the philosopher drowsiness in the matter blaze. In this case, the wine conception is in a social ontological perspective that she develops beyond banquets and symposiums. The meeting happens in the intimate material, in a deployed material from the imaginary . The social object becomes the voice of a cosmic ontology, unfolded by a dialectic of the material and the deep. In this lecture, the wine Phenomenology and Metaphysic are both, imaginary  products of a theoretic vision.

A study of Drysdale's The Gatekeeper's Wife that analyses changes from early sketches in terms of Australian immigration policy and the replacement of Aboriginal figures with references to British taste for Giorgione and Piero della Francesca's early Renaissance fresco of the Madonna del Parto.