Edward Lucie-Smith

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, in what was then the Colony of Jamaica, on 27 February 1933. His father, John Dudley Lucie-Smith, was a Jamaican-born colonial civil servant who became Assistant Colonial Secretary, and his mother was Mary Frances Lucie-Smith (nee Lushington). The family had lived in the Caribbean since the seventeenth century, first as planters in Barbados, then as lawyers in Demerara and civil servants in Jamaica; a great-grandfather arrived in Jamaica in 1863 as Lord Chief Justice. His uncle Euan Lucie-Smith, one of the first mixed-heritage officers in a regular British Army infantry regiment, was killed in the First World War.

As a boy he was fascinated by archaeology, which he later said was his route into art. His father died while Edward was still a child (of lung cancer at 58, he said in 2017, after being gassed in the war and smoking heavily), an experience he turned into his most anthologised poem, The Lesson. In 1946, at 13, he left Jamaica for Britain.

In England he was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and spent time in Paris before winning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. He read History, wrote art criticism for the student magazine Isis (beginning with a review and profile of the potter Bernard Leach) and graduated with a BA in 1954. He then did national service as an education officer in the Royal Air Force for two years.

After the RAF he spent about a decade as an advertising copywriter at Notley's in London, writing poetry and his first art reviews on the side. His debut collection, A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems (1961), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Arts Council Triennial Award. He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum as organiser of The Group, the London poets' circle that met to read and critique new work, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964, the year he appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 6 with Jack Clemo and George MacBeth.

With Bernard Stone and George Rapp he directed Turret Books, a small press founded in London in 1965. He edited The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (1965), The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse (1967) and the standard anthology British Poetry Since 1945 (1970), translated Claudel, Apollinaire and Jean-Paul de Dadelsen, and published collections including Confessions and Histories (1964), Towards Silence (1968), The Well-Wishers (1974) and Changing Shape: New and Selected Poems (2002). He collaborated with Ralph Steadman on The Rhino (1971). By the end of the 1960s he had handed over the running of The Group as art writing took over his working life.

Lucie-Smith became a full-time freelance writer in 1966. His first art book, Rubens, had been commissioned by Paul Hamlyn in 1961. Movements in Art since 1945 (1969), regularly revised for decades, became a standard survey text worldwide. Other key titles include Symbolist Art (1972), The Invented Eye (1975) on photography, Art Today (1977), The Story of Craft (1981), A History of Industrial Design (1983), The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms (1984), Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists (1985), Sculpture Since 1945 (1987), Sexuality in Western Art (1991), 20th Century Latin American Art (1993), Race, Sex and Gender in Contemporary Art (1994), Visual Arts in the 20th Century (1996), Ars Erotica (1997), Art Tomorrow (2002) and Censoring the Body (2007).

He wrote for Art News and Review (later ArtReview) for almost thirty years, including a critic's diary column for over a decade and profiles of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and also for The Listener, the New Statesman, The London Magazine and The Spectator. In later life he was chief reviewer for Artlyst. He presented Conversations with Artists for BBC Radio 3 in the early 1980s.

He curated three Peter Moores Projects surveying current British painting and sculpture at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1977, 1979 and 1981), co-curated The Self Portrait: A Modern View (1987) and The New British Painting, which toured the United States from 1988 to 1990, and organised retrospectives of Lin Emery and George Dunbar at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He was consultant curator for Art of the Fantastic: Latin American Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He lectured for the British Council in Belgium, Luxembourg, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Australia, toured New Zealand in 1993, and served on the juries of the 6th Cairo Biennale (1996) and the 3rd Sharjah Biennale (1997). Later he curated shows at the Bermondsey Project Space in London.

Lucie-Smith lived in London from 1946 for the rest of his life; a 2006 photograph shows him at his home in Kensington. He was openly gay and had lived through the years when homosexuality was criminalised in Britain. He was also a photographer, mostly of male nudes, who began to take photography seriously in his sixties and exhibited in St Petersburg, Kuala Lumpur and Kingston, Jamaica. He collected antiquities rather than contemporary art and travelled widely, saying travel was his main form of exercise. He said the dancer Anton Dolin of the Ballets Russes was a cousin, and that late in life he learned of a mixed-race half-brother, Dudley, born to his father in Jamaica around 1920. No spouse, partner or children were named in published obituaries.

He prized his independence above all and liked to say he had no institutional ties, no university chair and no museum post, so nobody had leverage over him. He was sceptical of what he saw as the quasi-religious faith of the contemporary art world, of art that is art merely because someone says so, and of tokenism in curating. ArtReview described him as conservative in outlook, critical of shallow Marxist dogma in twentieth-century art and later of identity politics, yet increasingly comfortable using his experience as a gay man to interpret art. He engaged seriously with feminist art when many critics of his generation did not, and remained friendly with left-wing writers such as John Berger.

John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize (1961) and Arts Council Triennial Award (1961) for A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected 1964). Member of the Academie Europeenne de Poesie. Member of the Critics' Circle. In 2026 the National Portrait Gallery accepted three portraits of him by well-known artists, including Beryl Cook. Artlyst reported that the painter Sean Scully had pushed for a state honour for him without success.

Lucie-Smith's survey books introduced generations of students and general readers to modern and contemporary art, and his anthology British Poetry Since 1945 shaped how post-war British poetry was taught. He championed younger artists, including an early Sean Scully, and wrote about erotic, gay and feminist art long before such subjects were mainstream. Bruce Chatwin's biographer Nicholas Shakespeare called him an important influence on Chatwin. His papers and the records of Turret Books are held by the University of Maryland Libraries.

In his later years Lucie-Smith promoted a group of drawings attributed to Francis Bacon and owned by the Italian journalist Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. Christie's, Sotheby's and the Francis Bacon Estate did not authenticate the works, and Martin Harrison, editor of the Bacon catalogue raisonne, excluded them, telling a court in 2012 that he did not see Bacon's hand in them. His advocacy for the disputed drawings drew criticism.

Poetry: A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems (1961), Confessions and Histories (1964), Towards Silence (1968), The Well-Wishers (1974), Beasts with Bad Morals (1984), Changing Shape (2002), Surviving (2017). Anthologies: The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse (1965), The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse (1967), British Poetry Since 1945 (1970). Art: Movements in Art since 1945 (1969), Symbolist Art (1972), The Invented Eye (1975), Art Today (1977), The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms (1984), The Male Nude: A Modern View (1985), Sexuality in Western Art (1991), Women and Art: Contested Territory (1999, with Judy Chicago), Censoring the Body (2007). Broadcasting: Conversations with Artists, BBC Radio 3 (early 1980s). His autobiographical essay A Child of World War I appeared in The London Magazine in 2014.

Edward Lucie-Smith died on 11 July 2026, aged 93, the date given by The Telegraph obituary and Wikipedia. The place and cause of his death were not made public. Artlyst announced his death the same day, and obituaries and tributes followed in The Telegraph, The Times, ArtReview and Hyperallergic.