Bernard Smith (art historian)

Australian art historian, critic and academic (1916–2011)

Bernard William Smith (3 October 1916 – 2 September 2011) was an Australian art historian, critic and cultural historian who played a central role in the development of Australian art history as an academic field. His pioneering book European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) examined the visual culture of European exploration and its relationship to Enlightenment, analysing how representations of the Pacific formed part of broader European attempts to understand and interpret newly encountered parts of the world. The book has been described as the most influential work of scholarship produced by an Australian art historian and has had a lasting impact on the study of the colonial encounter.

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