Edward Lucie-Smith

Edward Lucie-Smith 1933-, British poet and art critic, b. Jamaica, grad. Oxford, 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).

Bibliography: See his autobiography, The Burnt Child (1975).

Lucie-Smith, Edward (1933– ). British poet and writer on art. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, settled in England in 1946, and read history at Merton College, Oxford. He has worked mainly as a freelance journalist, radio broadcaster, and author, and has written or edited about 50 books, mainly poetry anthologies or popular works on 20th-century art. They include Movements in Art Since 1945 (1969), Symbolist Art (1972), Art Today (1977), Cultural Calendar of the 20th Century (1979), Super Realism (1979), Art in the Seventies (1980), Art in the Thirties (1985), American Art Now (1985), Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists (1986), Sculpture Since 1945 (1987), Art in the Eighties (1990), Art Deco Painting (1990), Latin American Art of the Twentieth Century (1993), Art Today (1995; this is a different book from his 1977 work of the same title, although it has the same publisher), and Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century (1996). He has also written introductions to collections of homoerotic photographs and articles for numerous journals and newspapers.