Eric Smith: The Metaphysics of Paint
Few things better reveal the shallowness of Australia’s ‘art prize’ culture than the career of Eric Smith (1919-2017). Between 1953 and 2003, Smith won the Archibald Prize three times, the Wynne Prize twice, the Sulman Prize three times, and the Blake Prize a whopping five times. If prizes counted for anything, Smith should be one of the best-known, most important artists in Australian art history. Instead, there are few people under the age of 40 who have heard of him.
One of those people is architect, Benjamin Jay Shand, who has contracted a passion for Smith’s late abstract paintings, and talked Macquarie University Art Gallery into holding the survey, Eric Smith: The Metaphysics of Paint. It’s a strange fixation, as these pictures seem to belong to another age. I thought of Little Bill in Belloc’s poem, who “was quite unnaturally keen, on Athalie by Jean Racine”.
It's doubtful that Macquarie needed much convincing. Director, Rhonda Davis, has an unfashionable devotion to local art history, an area much neglected by the Art Gallery of NSW – although new management offers new hope.