Edward Lucie-Smith


John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith, known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is an English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.

Biography

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read History at Merton College, Oxford from 1951 to 1954.
After serving in the Royal Air Force as an Education Officer and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer. He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.
At the beginning of the 1980s 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 1960s until the 2000s. 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 Edward Lucie-Smith has been promoting drawings attributed to Francis Bacon owned by Italian journalist Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. However, Christie's, Sotheby's and the Francis Bacon Estate have not authenticated these works known as the 'Francis Bacon Italian Drawings'. Martin Harrison, the editor of the Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, does not include 'The Francis Bacon Italian Drawings' and does not see the hand of Bacon in these drawings.

Poetry and fiction

1960–1979