About the speaker
Art Critic and Poet, Edward Lucie Smith was born in Jamaica in 1933 and graduated from Oxford in 1954. He has lived in London since 1951, where he worked as an advertising copywriter (1956–66) and as an editor of books on art. Among his works of poetry are A Tropical Childhood (1961) and Confessions and Histories (1964). His important criticism includes Art in Britain 1969–1970 (1970), Symbolist Art (1973), American Art Now (1985), and Art Today (1977, rev. ed. 1995). He has also edited The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (1968), British Poetry since 1945 (1970), Art in the 1970s (1980), Art in the 1980s (1990), and Visual Arts in the 20th Century (1996).