There are many routes to artistic obscurity. The surest path, of course, is to have never been discovered in the first place. But this wasn’t the case with the late Eric Smith (1919-2017).

His story is not that of Vincent Van Gogh or Vivian Maier, who only achieved fame after death. Nor did he go out of his way to try and remain obscure, like Ron Gittens or James Hampton.

Rather, Smith’s is a story of a major artist who quite simply, and unexpectedly, vanished from public life.

A new exhibition at the Macquarie University Art Gallery, which I am co-curating, will display a range of Smith’s work – including paintings from the last four decades of his career that have never been shown before.

Smith was an artist constantly in search of ways to “express truths in our times”, and employed diverse ways of doing so across a career that included religious paintings, portraits and large abstract works.

Between his breakthrough year in 1956, when he won the first of six Blake Prizes with The Scourged Christ, and 1982, when he won the last of his three Archibalds with a portrait of Peter Sculthorpe, Smith was as lauded as an artist could be.

He had a significant role in launching Australian abstract expressionism in the famous group show, Direction 1.........

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