The art critic and poet Edward Lucie-Smith, who wrote for ArtReview for almost thirty years, has died.
Born in Jamaica, where his family had lived since the seventeenth century, Lucie-Smith came to England on a school scholarship. After studying history at Oxford he arrived in London in 1964, and quickly set about forming The Group, a regular gathering of poets who rejected the modernist fashions of the time.
The critic first started contributing reviews to Art News and Review, as ArtReview was then known, from the 1970s onwards, earning £1 a commission, invariably penning his thoughts of the shows of the day during his lunch break at Notley’s Advertising Agency, his day job. Taking to criticism full time, he went on to write the critic’s diary column for over a decade as well as penning profiles of the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basiquat.
Beyond the magazine, and titles including The Listener and New Statesman, Lucie-Smith was prolific as an author, publishing over a hundred books, including a biography of Joan of Arc, historical fiction, and more than sixty books about art aimed at a general readership. The latter included The Male Nude: a Modern View (1985), Ars Erotica: an Arousing History of Erotic Art (1997), Sexuality in Western Art (1991), Movements in Art since 1945 (2001), A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today (2003). He also collaborated with Beryl Cook on several books, including Bertie and the Big Red Ball, a 1982 children’s story about a mischievous cat. The following year Cook painted the critic as a nude faun with a quill in his hand.
While conservative in outlook, first bemoaning Marxist dogma ‘of rather a shallow and unsubtle kind’ that coursed through twentieth century art, later eschewing identity politics in the next century – what he saw as the voguish consensus of contemporary curating – Lucie-Smith grew increasingly comfortable using the experiences of being a gay man to interpret the art he wrote about. He was also friendly with ArtReview’s leftwing coterie of writers, including John Berger.
Lucie-Smith curated a number of exhibitions, including three surveys of British art at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, The New British Painting (which toured US venues in 1988-90) and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art.
