Bernard Smith’s new book, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and Its History is aimed directly at those school and university students who, he writes, ‘may need an introductory primer to the art history of the 20th century’. Although it offers a lucid and accessible survey of familiar territory, The Formalesque is by no means a straightforward textbook. Smith’s persuasive, even pugnacious style has remained remarkably undiminished by time (the author is now in his nineties and this, as he himself has said, will probably be his last book).

The Formalesque is as much about words as it is about images. After an autobiographical introduction, which is fascinating in its own right given Smith’s status as perhaps the most influential Australian art historian of the twentieth century, the first chapter consists of a glossary of the book’s key terms and concepts, from ‘Abstraction and Abstract Art’ to ‘Zeitgeist’. The second is entitled ‘On Style: A Short History of Art History’, and provides a highly condensed but valuable guide to the discipline’s preoccupations in the longue durée, to use a favourite phrase of Smith’s, which he takes from Fernand Braudel. Plato, Aristotle, Vitruvius, the Abbot Suger, Alberti, Vasari, Bellori, Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Burckhardt, Ruskin, Riegl, Wölfflin, Warburg and Morelli are all discussed. This inclusion of a historiographical account of the discipline is unusual but very welcome in a book for students. It reflects Smith’s stated aim to bring the traditional resources of art history to bear on his subject. He sees modern art as belonging to a continuum rather than as an iconoclastic break with history, despite the rhetoric of the modernist avant-gardes and their later commentators.