Exhibition Review┃Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart, Paintings 1940-2011. Reviewed by Chris van Rompaey

Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart, Paintings 1940-2011

Chris van Rompaey

Approaching Storm by Railway, 1955, oil on canvas, 60.2 x 73 cm, Private collection

Jeffrey Smart’s work has long been notable for its hard-edged representation of urban wastelands in a manner that is at once poetically resonant and uncompromisingly classical. A recent retrospective, originally shown at two Adelaide venues and subsequently, in part, at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, will be remembered as a fitting tribute to the career of this major Australian artist. Curated by Barry Pearce, the exhibition was split between the formative work of Smart’s Adelaide years and that of the five plus decades following his move to Sydney. It is the latter period, from 1955 to 2011 and encompassing his time in Sydney, Rome and Tuscany, that formed the focus of the TarraWarra exhibition.

The tripartite division of the gallery space lent itself seamlessly to a structure which emphasised the three phases of Smart’s mature career. While the inclusion of some earlier work would have provided a fuller picture of his formative influences, the Sydney paintings retain, alongside elements which epitomise his later style, traces of a less developed mode. It is thus possible for the viewer to observe at first hand the transformation of a range of conventionally modernist techniques into a finely honed visual language, eminently fitted to the task of rendering Smart’s unique vision of the postwar city and its industrial hinterland.

If I may at this point be permitted a brief autobiographical digression, I should point out that my interest in Smart goes beyond an admiration of his painting. Through his weekly broadcast as Phidias on the ABC Argonauts Club in the mid-1950s, he was directly responsible for my lifelong fascination with the world of art and artists. It was only many years later, after becoming familiar with Smart’s work and acquiring a copy of Peter Quartermaine’s definitive monograph, that I became aware of Phidias’s actual identity.

Two overriding pieces of advice from the Argonaut days stand out in my memory. First, you don’t need to search far and wide for a suitable subject; just paint whatever is around you. Second, a good painting doesn’t just happen; it requires careful attention to compositional elements such as form, colour and tonal contrast. It is evident that these principles have guided Smart’s own practice throughout his career.

The Listeners 1965 oil on canvas 690.5 x 70 cm Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat

A 1955 Sydney painting, Approaching Storm by Railway (fig. 1), is notable for the way that it both extends Smart’s previously established manner and anticipates future developments. The prominent roadway with its bold curvilinear form, the vividly lit middle ground contrasting dramatically with the darkened foreground and ominously black sky, and the patterned repetition of the railway gantries introduce effects that will be subject to many later variations. At the same time the softened edges of the dominant forms, the loose, impressionistic brushstrokes used to render the grass, and the textured impasto of the road surface are remnants of a modernist apprenticeship soon to be abandoned for a technique built around a starker, flatter and more crisply defined application of paint. The very different treatment of the grass in The Listeners (1965, fig. 2) presents a telling contrast with Approaching Storm, clear similarities between the two paintings notwithstanding. Here, individual blades are meticulously rendered, diminishing in size in strict accordance with the laws of perspective. The result is at once hyperrealistic and curiously stylised: the play of light on the grass, each blade curved to replicate the effect of wind, gives the grassed area as a whole a rhythmic articulation that, alongside the semi-reclining, bare-torsoed male figure, and the eerily humanoid radio transmitter on the hilltop behind, becomes a major compositional feature.

The catalyst for this and other comparable refinements—developments that encompass both stylistic and thematic elements—was Smart’s decision to settle in Rome in 1964. Specifically, as Pearce notes in the exhibition catalogue, it was the EUR district with its ‘dramatic mix of Mussolini-inspired apartment blocks, open fields, odd architectural relics, hoardings and huge radio transmitters like creations from The War of the Worlds’ that provided Smart with the material that would become his stock-in-trade of instantly recognisable motifs.[1] Collectively, the paintings dating from this period reveal an ambitious program of experimentation, testing arrangements of these and related motifs to their limits in terms of angle of vision, tonal and colour contrasts, economy of detail and repetitive patterning. The result is a rich visual vocabulary, readily adaptable to the landscape around Arezzo following Smart’s move in 1971 to a farmhouse in this locality and, interestingly, with a distinctively Australian inflection in works inspired by occasional antipodean visits.

The Dome, 1977, oil and acrylic on canvas, 74.5 x 74.4 cm, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville

Smart has erroneously been described as a photorealist. Certainly, there are instances in his work of heightened verisimilitude, for example, the closely modelled central image of The Dome (fig. 3) and the precisely rendered reflective surface of the road coach in The Traveller (fig. 4). But if these details suggest an affinity with the photorealist movement of the 1970s, the parallel stops there. Dependence on the camera and on the projected image as a prop for delineating form are entirely foreign to Smart’s approach. Rather, it is the compositional principles of Renaissance masters such as Piero della Francesca, openly acknowledged as a major influence, that inform the construction of pictorial space.

The Traveller, 1973, synthetic polymer paint and oil on canvas, 100.5 x 116 cm, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

There is, however, nothing formulaic about this process. One of the great pleasures of the exhibition was the opportunity it offered to observe the inventiveness of Smart’s responses to the challenge of bringing the various pictorial elements together in a memorable way. It is tempting to seek evidence of an evolutionary development, such as a move towards more minimal rectangular forms or the articulation of space through colour rather than through tonal contrast, but the actuality is rarely so straightforward. If anything, evolutionary shifts within the broad parameters are cyclical rather than linear.

Some of Smart’s most striking effects result from the downplaying of certain pictorial elements to allow for a more intensified focus on others. The Directors (1977, fig. 5) is dominated by the stark minimalism of its central motif, a series of identical hoardings. The black-and-white (or, more precisely, off-white) colour scheme of the directional arrows is replicated in the treatment of the road surface and its concrete edging. The contrast thus produced, however, has nothing to with the rendition of light and shade, but is purely representative of local colour. At the same time tonal variation is not entirely absent. There is a subtle lightening of the bitumen as it recedes into the middle ground, allowing the shadow of a truck, which would otherwise remain imperceptible, to register against the roadway. It is small touches such as this, complemented by the jewel-like façade of an utterly ordinary and seemingly endless apartment block stretched against the horizon, that underscore the high level of craftsmanship for which Smart is renowned.

The Directors, 1977, oil on plywood, 46.5 x 209.5 cm, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

Other compositions bring vivid colour to the fore in a way that is heightened by a judicious use of tone. The bright turquoise of The Construction Fence (1978, fig. 6) is set off, in the immediate foreground, by an even brighter, diagonally striped panel, one of a set of traffic directors. But while it is the juxtaposition of colours that impinges most immediately on the viewer’s awareness, it is the use of shadow, particularly to emphasise the vertical articulation of the fence and on the apartment block and traffic signs, that imparts an extraordinary intensity to the colour. This is further heightened by the almost electrified presence of a young girl, dressed in pink with her hair streaming behind her as she runs along the street in front of the fence. Are we to see her as Blackman’s Alice, bizarrely transposed into this rather threatening setting, or, as Smart would no doubt insist, is she simply there to provide a sense of scale?

The Construction Fence, 1978, oil and acrylic on canvas, 88.5 x 228.4 cm, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville

The short answer surely is both. While the registration of scale cannot be overlooked, it is equally reductive, looking more generally at Smart’s work, to ignore the contribution of the figure to its thematic dimension. There is always something unsettling about the presence of a human form in a given location, a feeling of displacement and unease that, curiously, attaches itself far more to the viewer than to the actual subject. The figure in Jacob Descending (1979, fig. 7), for example, appears to be occupied with no more than the mundane business of climbing down a staircase. His left hand routinely grasps the railing and he looks downward to make sure of his footing. He seems quite unaware of the illogicality of the staircase itself, a spiral structure attached to a central pole and providing access to an observation platform from which nothing is actually visible apart from an unremarkable, largely cloud-covered sky. The impression of nonfunctionality is further emphasised by the placement of the structure above a featureless stretch of sea to which a low horizon-line draws only minimal attention.

Jacob Descending, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 94 x 55.6 cm, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville

Such compositional techniques lend to much of Smart’s work a distinctly surreal quality. At times, one is reminded of Giorgio di Chirico, with the difference that, whereas di Chirico tends to gain his effects by including an incongruous object (such as a bunch of bananas) within a particular picture space, Smart achieves a comparably powerful sense of unreality through the arrangement of motifs that are inalienably part of the landscapes he paints. Nothing may be as it actually appears, but everything is as it might conceivably appear.

Smart’s most recent painting, which he has also declared his last, stands as a fitting if not entirely predictable conclusion to a long and distinguished career. Labyrinth (2011, fig. 8) deliberately eschews many of the attributes that one associates with his work. Gone is the finely observed detail associated with particularity of object and place. The labyrinth itself is clearly representative of no actual structure. It has no determinable location, though its colouring suggests a desert setting, and it gives the impression of extending infinitely in all directions. A lone figure, wearing a broad-rimmed hat and blue jacket (H. G. Wells, according to Pearce) wanders through its passageways. There are no bright colours, and while the labyrinth is conceived along rigidly geometric lines the hard edges have softened and the paint, particularly on the wall in the foreground, is applied with a freedom not seen since the early Sydney years.

The symbolic character of the central motif, along with the elimination of specific detail and the inclusion of a figure associated with the fictional exploration of time, give Labyrinth an intensely meditative quality. It invites reflection on such matters as the nature of artistic achievement, the possibility of progress, and the relation of past, present and future. As the accompanying quotation from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ suggests, to end is to return to the beginning, but with a different understanding. And if the viewer’s meditations are in the first instance inspired by what is in the painting, they are, given the residual impact of the earlier works, just as powerfully shaped by what is absent.

Labyrinth, 2011, oil on canvas, 100 x 1200 cm, Private collection



[1] Barry Pearce, Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart Paintings 1940-2011 (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2012), p. 15.

 

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