The essays are not inaccessible in their original publications. Bradley’s listing makes it fairly easy to check when and where Smith expressed an opinion on a particular artist or subject. So, do the essays have a new value when grouped in book format? Well, yes and no.

In his introduction Smith says that the selection of essays may help to reveal the development of his own critical practice. And certainly the essays form a cohesive group with Smith riding his favourite hobby horses (the superiority of figurative over abstract art, his support of the Melbourne social realists, and the international importance of the Antipodean painters) from first page to last. Between the front cover’s Sali Herman portrait of Smith, then an intense thirty-year-old, to the back cover’s present-day photograph of him, now more relaxed but still a distance-gazing idealist, lies a professional lifetime of art history writing and criticism, probably never to be equalled in this country, but during which his opinions on the issues covered in this book have changed imperceptibly, if at all, over forty-seven years.

In an article titled ‘My dear Humphrey’ in the June edition of Art Monthly, Bernard Smith wrote that The Antipodean Manifesto was one of the most radical acts he had ever performed and still more than our ‘cultural cringe’ culture can stomach – that one day we ‘will come to realize what in international terms it was all about’. If we don’t it will not be for want of Smith’s trying to tell us. The Death of the Artist as Hero contained three essays relating to the Antipodeans, one a long and very detailed account of the formation of the group and the writing of the manifesto.

This selection contains three more essays – the opening address given at the exhibition, another account of the formation of the group, and a review of the work of the seven group members. As well as this, the Antipodeans receive explanatory mentions in several other articles. For instance, Smith uses his reviews of books by Patrick McCaughey (Fred Williams), Richard Haese (Rebels and Precursors: The revolutionary years of Australian art) and Gary Catalano (The Years of Hope: Australian art and criticism 1959–1968) to contend that the authors have failed to come to terms with the issues expressed in The Antipodean Manifesto and to further induct his readers with his own belief in the group’s significance.

Smith seems to have met with a singular lack of support for his view over the years. As close to the event as 1962, John Brack, one of the participants, wrote of Smith’s seeing The Antipodean Manifesto as a historical event. In December 1962 he wrote in ABR, ‘The artists involved in that episode do not regard it … in such a light’. As recently as last year, Clifton Pugh commented that the ‘manifesto worried everyone, including us’ and that while he, Blackman and Percival ‘had only planned an Australian landscape show, David Boyd and Bernard Smith “wanted to make a statement about abstraction”’. (Weekend Australian, 22–23 October 1988.) One can but admire Smith’s persistence and, in a strange way, hope that if time does vindicate his opinion he is still around to enjoy an ‘I told you so’.

The other recurrent theme of the essay collection (and of course closely related to his faith in the Antipodean painters) is Smith’s never flagging belief in the superiority of figurative over abstract painting and his continued support of the Melbourne social realist painters. No opportunity is missed for barracking for figurative painting, from the rather gloating observations on Fred Williams’ and Ian Fairweather’s return to figurative painting after brief flirtations with abstraction, to a comment that works of Jackson Pollock which looked ‘tense enough’ in 1950 looked like wallpaper designs in 1962, to the superiority of Henry Moore’s wartime shelter drawings over his sculptures of the 1930s because of Moore’s return to nature and to social relevance. Social relevance is, too, the catchcry of Smith’s continued promotion of the social realist painters. The contrast between his seeing these artists as the high point of Australian art in Place, Taste and Tradition (1945) and his pleading that their work ‘deserves to be better known and given a fair go’ (the last sentence of this book) indicates changes in Australian society and perhaps the authority of Smith’s art-historical voice, but not in his opinions. The emphasis has, however, been slightly changed (probably intentionally to appeal to his audience). The anti­fascist attraction of the artists, emphasised by Smith in 1945, has been replaced by the more contemporary attraction of their appeal to conscience: ‘they were the first to depict in Australia’s “high art” the frightful conditions of present day Aboriginal society’.

Smith’s ongoing themes, particularly that of the Melbourne social realist painters, are of present concern. Several articles (most notably Michael Keon’s ‘Eyes in Action’ in the Age Monthly Review, August 1989) have been provoked by the Angry Penguins exhibition and catalogue, in London last year and presently touring Australia. One suspects this collection of essays is a timely ‘cashing in’ on this interest – and, to be fair, why not? As commentary on activities in which Smith was a participant it is relevant – if one has not already read Place, Taste and Tradition and the two earlier essay collections. There is really nothing new.

The least successful items of this collection are Smith’s art criticisms. Apart from showing Smith’s continuing passions – and we don’t need thirty-six short (one to two pages) reviews to do this – the pieces do not have a lot to offer, mostly, I feel, because of the lack of illustrations. While many works discussed are well known, many are not. A ten-page review of a French art exhibition held in Sydney in 1953 and consisting of works by obscure painters such as Manessier, Legueult, Bezombe, and Lagranges, or unknown works by better known artists, for example, has little meaning when the art works discussed by Smith cannot be seen. The thirty black and white reproductions in the book are tokens only – often scarcely related to the text and sometimes eccentric. For instance, the last essay, a plea for the work of Counihan, Bergner, and O’Connor, is illustrated by a reproduction of Albert Tucker’s ‘Victory Girl’. If this essay collection is to have contemporary value in showing Smith’s development as a critic, then reproductions of the works discussed are essential. Most of the short reviews would hence have been better left in their original publications for the enterprising researcher with a particular interest in the subject.

Much more engrossing are Smith’s book reviews, largely because they are not really reviews at all but excuses for Smith, after mildly taking the respective authors to task, to air his own views on the artist or subject. They are consequently polemical and informative.

Smith’s writing on Australian art is inescapable for anyone with the slightest interest in the subject. His work is always opinionated and true to his beliefs. The reader of The Critic as Advocate, unless coming to Smith’s writing for the first time (does such a person exist?), is therefore left with the feeling of having already ‘been there, done that’.