The ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory is hosting a visit from art critic Sebastian Smee who will be presenting a keynote lecture at the forum Writing lives, revealing lives; portraiture and personhood at the National Portrait Gallery on 1 July 2018. The forum is a partnership between CAHAT and the NPG. In his lecture, ‘Art and Rivalry: speculating about the psychodynamics of creative innovation’, Smee will discuss rivalry as an engine of innovation, and the challenge of writing about relationships between great artists, with special reference to Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Registrations for the forum will be open in June.

Sebastian Smee is the art critic at the Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art. As art critic for the Boston Globe, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011, and was runner up in 2008. In Australia he has worked as the art critic for both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian. In the UK, he worked for The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and other publications. He has authored five books on Lucian Freud and one on Mark Bradford, and he teaches non-fiction writing at Wellesley College.