As the blurb correctly said: ‘Here, almost for the first time, is a full-scale definitive history of Australian painting … written for those seeking a useful and comprehensive introduction to the subject and should be valuable equally to artists, teachers, scholars and the general reader … an authoritative, forthright and attractive text.’

It wasn’t left in peace like Place, Taste and Tradition. Instead, an updated Australian Painting 1788–1970 was issued after Smith became inaugural Professor of Contemporary Art at the Power Institute of Fine Art, University of Sydney. During his last three years in Melbourne, he was also art critic for The Age. Maybe his time as a newspaper critic gave Smith an overload of information. Whatever, for a mere ten years, three more chapters and 120 pages were loaded onto the nine chapters and 330 pages that had covered the previous centuries. Today it’s good to be reminded of the lost heyday of colour-field abstraction, but the second edition was lopsided.

Twenty years later, Terry Smith added three more chapters. Though I reviewed that third edition as ‘Bernard’s creaky classic’, Terry’s update covering the 1970s and 80s – and, for the first time, fully embracing Aboriginal painting – was nevertheless worth doing. Robert Hughes’s The Art of Australia, a lively reworking of Bernard’s pioneering structure, remained (and remains) unrevised since 1970; and, in 1990, there were still no alternatives to Smith & Smith. Now we have Australian Painting 1788–2000, a fourth edition with one new chapter by Christopher Heathcote to cover the 1990s. However, Smith, Smith & Heathcote has three competitors: A Story of Australian Painting (Macmillan, 1994), by Mary Eagle & John Jones, written around a single corporate collection recently sold on to Kerry Stokes; Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism (Thames and Hudson World of Art series, 1997), by Christopher Allen; and Australian Art (OUP, Oxford History of Art series, 2001), by Andrew Sayers.

Australian Painting 1788–2000 runs to 630 pages. It now seems heavy going when compared with its three competitors, in their brisk 250 or so pages. The profuse 331 illustrations are little compensation. Those from the first and best incarnation of the book are now mostly washed out and smudgy. The blurb for the first edition believed that its 191 illustrations constituted ‘The most significant selection of Australian painting that has yet been reproduced’, but, for the second edition, too many insignificant 1960s works were added. Later, one became aware of too many significant absences from the first century and a half. Illustrations are always a danger zone for text-minded publishers. Artists’ names vary between text and captions, or are conspicuously misspelt (Graeme ‘Drendell’ exhibits as ‘Drendel’). Changes of attribution occur: an 1817 painting now given to Joseph Lycett is still captioned as James Wallis’s. Picture titles remain unadjusted to the original form established by subsequent research. Augustus Earle’s Mrs Piper and Her Family (c.1826) is still credited as owned by Vaucluse House, where it was once on loan from the Mitchell Library. The new edition still credits many private owners who have died since 1962.

The fledgling National Gallery of Australia used Smith’s illustrations as a kind of shopping list, its acquisitions now inconspicuously noted in the preliminary matter among ‘Amendments to third edition’. The NGA probably erred in telling the publisher that ‘Gift of Sunday Reed 1977’ was the donor credit for Nolan’s Kelly paintings; I remember a more complex and interesting request: ‘Gift of John & Sunday Reed, with love.’

What makes the text heavy going for a present-day reader is the incorporation of a lot of biographical matter (seldom included in current ‘art writing’), lots of brief mentions and lists of lesser painters (no doubt good for sales), and a lot about art schools and institutions (more interesting to art-makers than to art-consumers).

Despite the ‘death of the author’, I agree with Bernard that an artist’s particular familial and geographical formation explains as much about a work of art as broad cultural constructions. He gives great introductions:

Sidney Nolan … born in Melbourne in 1917 into a family, which, like Russell Drysdale’s, had been settled in Australia for several generations. But where Drysdale’s forebears were Scottish and members of the pioneering pastoral aristocracy, Nolan’s were Irish and working-class. His grandfather was a policeman in the days of the Kelly gang; his father a tram-driver for the Melbourne & Metropolitan Tramways Board. After completing his education at a Victorian State School, Nolan became an enthusiastic racing cyclist and worked at various odd jobs, picking asparagus, cooking hamburgers, mining gold and so forth. Then in 1938, following upon some art school training and work in commercial art during the mid-1930s [at Fayrefield Hats, a significant prelude, Cynthia Nolan once suggested, to the Kelly helmets], he turned to painting … Meanwhile he was reading widely: Rimbaud, the French symbolists, Blake … early paintings were programmatic with much of dada about them, designed in their impertinent simplicity to shock the art-loving public out of its wits.

Then we get his assessment of the Kelly paintings:

It is a measure of Nolan’s genius that he should create a Kelly of just the right size, neither a grandiose hero figure nor a proletarian outsider filled with self-righteousness and self-pity, but a kind of absurd relative, an eccentric brother, a joking saint who appears at odd moments merely to assert his eternal, if subterranean existence in the Australian mind … bright and colourful, with light and dexterous lyrical grace … executed in a kind of sham folk-art style … But the paintings are not, like Dobell’s best portraits, outstanding achievements by any standard and have been praised, perhaps, beyond their true worth.

Dobell, who scores more than sixteen pages, is less admired today. Smith’s writing lives – ‘It is not often in Dobell’s work that any inner grace or spiritual beauty shines through the fatty imprisonment of the flesh [rendered] as if he were painting the skin of a grub not long out of the earth’ – but the paintings are dying a little. Judgements have shifted.

Most damningly for the book’s continuing use, von Guérard scores only two dismissive paragraphs. Much new research has been done since the 1950s. Today he might well be claimed as our best nineteenth-century painter.

Another example is Art Deco, fascist-style figure painting, totally ignored by Smith, though Charles Meere’s Australian Beach Pattern (1940) is now a greatly loved icon. Napier Waller’s 1930s murals celebrating technological progress could have pushed the boundaries from easel-painting, as could Leonard French’s now-forgotten 1950s murals.

Our best abstract expressionist painter, Tony Tuckson, is mentioned only as a promising post–war student, his mature work having become visible only in 1970, which is when Terry Smith’s chapters begin to wrestle, successfully, with ‘A Problematic Practice’, that is with the marginalisation of painting under the onslaught of conceptual art, installation, photography and new media. Our best artist working in the 1990s might have been the painter and sculptor Howard Taylor in Western Australia, who is indeed acknowledged handsomely by Heathcote, but not illustrated.

Heathcote’s depressed final chapter is titled ‘An Embattled Medium’. Money drained away from all the arts in the 1990s, not only from painting, and flowed during pre-Olympic years towards the popular culture of sport. Rather grotesquely, the book concludes in 2000 with the outsider subculture of mural graffiti art, more interesting as a dangerous sporting performance than an artistic product. And rather sweetly, Heathcote finds a slender excuse to illustrate one of Bernard Smith’s surrealist paintings from 1940, before a quick run though the occult, the indigenous, the ecological, the return to Geometric Abstraction, Bricolage and Magic Realism.

Don’t buy the book if you want to know about the broad sweep of Australian art, let alone the narrower field of Australian painting. Buy Andrew Sayers’s instead. But, if you don’t have the earlier editions, consider buying this one for the first nine chapters, 1788–1960, where you will enjoy getting to know the attractive, warm-hearted, often funny writer who first taught us about our visual culture. He interweaves low art – cartooning, hackwork illustration – with high. He tries to kill off the one art-history ‘fact’ that still persists in popular lore: ‘Colonial painters saw Australian landscape only through English eyes.’ He makes it clear that, although he has to give several pages to Norman Lindsay, his art is pretty despicable. He launched Grace Cossington Smith and other women artists into our general awareness. He appreciates the Australian sardonic. Above all, he acknowledges the presence of Aboriginal Australians, concluding the first edition of Australian Painting with Arthur Boyd’s harrowing 1958 series Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste and David Boyd’s 1959 Tasmanian Aboriginal series, concerned with ‘human conflict, guilt, love, passion and forgiveness’.

Art history has moved on, but we will always love Bernard Smith for making Australia interesting, and for his nobility of spirit.