Edward lucie smith biography

Full Name: Lucie-Smith, Edward

Other Names:

Gender: male

Date Born:

Place Born: Kingston, Surrey, Jamaica

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): art critics, art historians, authors, and poets

Overview

Poet, art critic and prolific art-book writer. Lucie-Smith was the son of a British civil servant assigned to Jamaica, John Dudley Lucie-Smith (d. ) and Mary Frances Lushington (Lucie-Smith). His forbears had been some of the first white settlers in colonizing the island in Raised in the privileged environment of the white colonial class, his father died when he was eight years old. He and his mother moved to England in In Lucie-Smith received a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, still only seventeen. However, the college was full of older returning servicemen and he felt much out of place. Lucie-Smith wrote art criticism for Isis, Oxford&#;s student magazine, and earned a B.A. in His art criticism broadened into articles for the Listener, the New Statesman and the BBC program &#;Critics&#; as well. Lucie-Smith was much impressed with the criticism of John Berger. He fulfilled a military obligation as an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force for two years. Failing the foreign-office exam, Lucie-Smith entered Notley&#;s Advertising agency in London as a copywriter in , working as a journalist and in broadcasting on the side, and writing poetry. There he met two other writers later to be famous, the poet Peter Redgrove ( ) and the playwright William Trevor (b. ). The critic and poet Philip Hobsbaum () invited Lucie-Smith to join the avant-garde poetry discussion group known simply as &#;the Group.&#; With Hobsbaum&#;s encouragement, Lucie-Smith published a collection of poems, A Tropical Childhood. The book was highly praised and Lucie-Smith became a poet of note overnight. He assumed chairmanship of the Group when Hobsbaum withdrew. In the publisher Paul Hamlyn () commissioned Lucie-Smith&#;s first book, a popul

You are a leading internationally known figure in the field of arts, but also a well recognized artist-photographer and poet. Two years ago, you celebrated your birthday (84) publishing another collection of your poems titled “Surviving”. What did you intend refer to?

&#;First of all, simply to the fact of having been alive for so long. I will be 87 at the end of February. Secondly, to the fact that I am still very active in the world of the arts, not brooding in some retirement home.&#;

In one of the various interviews you released, you told about your activism in the poetry field as a runner, in London, precisely in the decades Fifties and Sixties. Can you remind us what was the social and cultural climate in that city at that time? In your opinion, what would be relationship to today’s cultural climate in London?

&#;By &#;runner&#; what you mean is that I was the chair-person and organizer of a group of poets (just called The Group) who met at my flat in London every week. Texts of the poems to be discussed were distributed in advance, and just one poet read on each occasion. It wasn’t a free for all. I didn’t found the group &#; I inherited it from Philip Hobsbaum, when he moved to Belfast and founded another group in that city. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who became a Nobel Prizewinner for literature, was a member of this Belfast group. The two groups used to exchange what we called ‘song-sheets’. The poetry world was much smaller then than it is now. Performance poetry, related to rap, was less important. There was a smaller range of ethnicities.&#;

You had the opportunity to stress your admiration for two important public figures who were also poets, Sir Thomas Wyatt (XVI century) and John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (XVII century). All this happens in spite of the deep difference, in style and tune, with your poems. What are the main features of the two personalities which particularly touched you?

&#;Basically, that they were both com

Britishpoet and art historian, born in Kingston, Jamaica, educated at Merton College, Oxford. He was an advertising copywriter from to , when he became a freelance writer. He was a prominent member of the Group and, with Philip Hobsbaum, co-edited A Group Anthology (). His principal collections of poetry are A Tropical Childhood (), Confessions and Histories (), Towards Silence (), and The Well-Wisher (). The conventional accomplishment of his earlier work was superseded by the growing imaginative range apparent in his use of dramatic monologue modes. His later work displays a leisured intensity appropriate to the meditatively erotic content of many poems. He is a prolific author of authoritative works on art history, among which are Eroticism in Western Art (), Art Deco Painting (), Art and Civilization (), British Art Now (), and Elisabeth Frink (). His numerous translations include highly regarded versions of Paul Claudel'sFive Great Odes (). Among his other works are The Dark Pageant (), a novel based on the life of Gilles de Rais, and an autobiography entitled The Burnt Child (). The many works he has edited include the popular The Liverpool Scene () (see Liverpool Poets), and The Faber Book of Art Anecdotes ().

Jamaican-born English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (born 27 February ), known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is a Jamaican-born English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster. He has been highly prolific in these fields, writing or editing over a hundred books, his subjects gradually shifting around the late s from mostly literature to mostly art.

Biography

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of Mary Frances (née Lushington) and John Dudley Lucie-Smith. He moved to the United Kingdom in He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, then spent time in Paris. In , he received a Bachelor of Arts from Merton College, Oxford.

After serving in the Royal Air Force as an education officer and working as a copywriter, Lucie-Smith became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer). He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.

At the beginning of the s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3. He was a contributor to The London Magazine, in which he wrote art reviews, and wrote regularly for the independent magazine ArtReview from the s until the s. A prolific writer, he has written more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

In addition he has curated a number of art exhibitions, including three Peter Moores projects at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, The New British Painting (–) and two retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He is a curator of the Bermondsey Project Space.

In recent years Lucie-Smith has been promoting drawings attributed to Francis Bacon owned by Italian journalist Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. However, Christie's, Sotheby's and the