Jeffrey Smart
“if a good painting comes off, it has a stillness, it has a perfection and that's as great as anything a musician or a poet can do.” Jeffrey Smart
Jeffrey Smart, Self-portrait at Papini's, 1984-1985 © Estate of Jeffrey Smart
Jeffrey Smart is the story of one of Australia’s greatest 20th century painters. There is no other Australian painter who quite matches the reach of Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) in forging images of urban structure and technology, not only related to the cities of our vast island continent but also well beyond.
HIs language of architecture and roads, trucks, overpasses and factories shaped by a timeless geometry of shadows and shafts of light, has constantly directed our gaze towards a strange new kind of everyday familiarity that we may never before have thought beautiful.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Smart is one of the most loved of modern Australian painters, and why his work in institutional collections and exhibitions - especially the recent retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia celebrating the centenary of his birth - has always been greeted with profound pleasure by visitors encouraged to recognise their environment in a totally different way.
Jeffrey Smart, Reflected Arrows, 1974 © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart
In 2006, Catherine Hunter visited Jeffrey Smart at his farmhouse in Tuscany where he was still hoping to paint the elusive great picture. Smart also took the crew to some of the places near Arezzo that have long inspired him - the concrete streetscapes and urban wastelands that have come to define his vision, and to nearby Sansepolcro, the birthplace of the great Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca.
Jeffrey Smart could be remarkably honest about his work and his own self-doubts.
“You go through fallow periods, droughts, when there’s nothing and you don’t have anything to paint. You don’t see anything. If you work hard, even without hope, then something happens. The offer of me working means that I’m offering myself, here come on, please give me some ideas whoever you are. But you have a feeling it comes from somewhere else,” explains Smart.
Smart in Studio, 2006 @ Stuart Purves
“He created a new aesthetic out of 20th century technology. Subjects that others found banal and brutal and uninteresting, to him were really just part of a new kind of beauty. He’s made so many people revisit their own response to 20th century technology,” says Barry Pearce, Emeritus Curator of Australian Art, Art Gallery of NSW.
Born in Adelaide, Smart studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts while also training at the Adelaide Teacher College. Smart’s early paintings bear the hallmarks that would identify his art thoughout his life - lonely urban vistas, the solitary figure in the landscape - and inspired by the poetry of TS Eliot.
Moving to Sydney in 1951, he first became well known as the art critic Phidias on the popular ABC children’s radio program The Argonauts and later on the ABC’s Children’s Hour. In 1963, he moved to Italy where he lived for the rest of his life.
It was in Italy that the colours and shapes and designs of a country rebuilding itself after the war inspired a new vernacular of modern painting for Smart.
“What he didn’t want to do was be kind of too descriptive, too obvious in his narratives. He sets up a stage set. I think his work is incredibly theatrical and what he’s doing is he’s inviting the viewer to bring their own stories. I think that’s something quite magical. So he’s telling a story in some ways but it’s not a story with a beginning and an ending. It’s very much open-ended and the viewer becomes a participant in the work,” says Deborah Hart, co-curator of the 2021 Smart exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.
Jeffrey Smart Film Trailer | Catherine Hunter Productions
REVIEWS:
Melinda Houston, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 3, 2022
“Not unlike the way The Final Quarter and Strong Female Lead told us a compelling story by linking archival footage in a way that vividly and shockingly demonstrated the evolution of real-life events – and their outcome – without a single linking device or fragment of narration, Hunter plaits fresh interviews, archival footage and priceless historical material (including Smart hosting the arts segment of kid’s TV show The Argonauts) in a way that’s both deceptively simple, and wonderfully entertaining.
The framing device is the 2021 exhibition staged by the National Gallery Of Australia to commemorate 100 years since Smart’s birth, and in many ways the storytelling is straightforward. We begin with Smart’s early life in Adelaide, and then continue on until his last painting in 2011, and a title card marking his death, in 2013. But along the way we get many of those “conversations” with a small, well-chosen collection of “experts” (including {Clive} James, David Malouf and Smart’s long-time partner Ermes De Zan) – and Smart himself, of course – with the chat moving back and forward between them in a completely natural, fluid way, and each contributing their bit to illuminating the man, his process, and his life.
There are no gimmicks. There are no celebrities (except, of course, for the ones who pop up naturally as part of Smart’s life). There’s no portentous narration and definitely no video diary (“It’s day 172 of me making this doco … I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever finish it …”). Instead, Hunter keeps the focus resolutely on her subject, confident in the belief that Smart, his life, his work, and the people who loved and were inspired by him, are more than sufficient to hold our interest. And guess what? She’s right.”
Steve Meacham, Australian Financial Review, Aug 4 2022
It was an offer Catherine Hunter could not refuse. The Walkley-nominated documentary director – whose films on Sidney Nolan, Margaret Olley, Ben Quilty and architect Glenn Murcutt are considered classics of the genre – was, in fact, completely taken aback.
“How would you like to join me for a couple of days with Jeffrey Smart at his home in Tuscany?” asked Barry Pearce, now Emeritus Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW. “And bring Bruce Inglis [Hunter’s collaborator, cinematographer and film editor].”
The result – a centenary after Smart’s birth and almost 20 years since his death in 2013, aged 91 – is an extraordinary filmic insight into the life, passions and insecurities of an artist who not only found beauty in the commonplace but also remains sought after at auction.
There are many new revelations in the hour-long documentary, which will be broadcast on ABC Plus next Wednesday. They are mainly from that original 2006 footage, when Smart was relaxing with his partner and friends. For a start, Smart explains how he created what Pearce calls ‘a new aesthetic out of 20th-century technology … subjects that others found banal and brutal to him were just part of a new kind of beauty’.
In Smart’s words, ‘I find it funny that perhaps in 100 years’ time, if people look at paintings done by the artists of this century, that the most ubiquitous things, like motor cars and television sets and telephones, don’t appear. We should paint the things around us.’”
© Catherine Hunter Productions 2024