Edward Lucie-Smith is an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet, an anthologist and a practicing photographer, whose work is represented in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Three solo exhibitions of his photography are planned for 1998-9 one in London, the others in Rome and Brussels.

He has published more than a hundred books in all, including more than sixty books about art: chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. He is generally regarded as both the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art, with sales for some titles totaling over 250,000 copies. A number of his books, among them Movements in Art since 1945, Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today, are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date, and has been completely updated four times since first publication. Other well-known texts include Sexuality in Western Art and 20th Century Latin American Art. The latter is regarded as the best concise account of a notoriously complex subject. It has been translated into Spanish and is widely used in Latin America itself. In addition to writing on art, he has written extensively on craft and on industrial design, where his books include The Story of Craft, A History of Industrial Design, and A Concise History of Furniture. Other texts include American Realism (1994), and Arts Erotica (1997). He has just completed Adam, a book on the male nude, and Zoo, an anthology of animal images. He is currently working on a book of images of women in art, Women in Art: Contested Territory, in collaboration with the American feminist artist Judy Chicago. Also due out later this year from Watson-Guptill Publications is a monograph on Judy Chicago.

His books have been translated into many languages, among them French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Chinese.

He has been curator of seven exhibitions, including three Peter Moores Projects at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (surveys of contemporary British art), The New British Painting (which toured U.S. venues in 1988-90), and two artist retrospectives. He is now working on New Academism', an exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art in Ostend, scheduled to open in April 1999. He was consultant for two further exhibitions including Art of the Fantastic, a survey of Latin American art held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987.

He has lectured in numerous countries including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Australia, turkey, Korea, Hong Kong and New Zealand. In the U.S. he has lectured at the National Gallery, Washington, the Yale School of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, Loyola University (New Orleans), and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

In Britain he was for many years a well-known broadcaster, appearing regularly on the BBC arts discussion program, The Critics, and its successor Critics' Forum. His appearances on these programs spanned a period of twenty years. He has been a member of the Art Advisory panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and was for twenty years a member of the council of the British Museum Society.

He has written for many leading British newspapers and periodicals, among them The Times of London (where at one time he had a regular column), the London Evening Standard (whose critic he was for two years), the New Statesman, the spectator and Encounter. He writes regularly for Index on Censorship, both on art and on other topics, such as the Internet.

He is respected both for the breadth of his sympathies and the clarity and directness of his writing on art, and for his ability to make complex contemporary developments accessible to a wide audience. At this moment, both because of his willingness to travel (he spends up to six months a year away from his home base in London) and because of the extremely wide distribution of his books, he is probably the best-known author in his field internationally.