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The Cleaners

If you were to compile a list of the most revered Australian artists of the last thirty years, Jeffrey Smart would be high on that list. His iconic paintings of anonymous urban landscapes are hugely popular with collectors, critics and the wider public. Naturally, any exhibition of new works by this 84 year old artist is eagerly anticipated and judging by the incredible number of people that attended the opening of his latest exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane his popularity seems assured.

Born in Adelaide in 1921 Smart left Australia almost forty years ago and has spent most of his life living and painting in the Italian countryside. However, his concrete landscapes could not be further removed from the idyllic scenery he lives in. His paintings are most often spoken of in clichés. Smart is described as a social commentator, a witness to the alienated city dweller or worker in a dehumanized landscape. However, Smart continues to shrug off these labels and it is true that they seem insufficient in accurately describing his paintings. He is not a painter of the reality of urban living. Elements of his images are taken from real places but they are modified and generalised. The effect is that the scenes could be renderings of any large modern city and are not anchored in Australia or Europe.

The same could be said of the people in his paintings. The human element is not what is important in these images and there is no real sense of narrative to the works. You are not invited by the artist to imagine these people as individuals. This is supported by close inspection of his paintings which demonstrate his simple and at times naïve method of painting human figures. Smart himself has said that the inclusion of figures in his paintings is a compositional device. Essentially, they give the viewer a sense of scale or act as a counterweight to the architecture in his images. This demonstrates that what is important to Smart is composition and spatial construction showing that although he doesn’t often make Italy specific subject of his work, the country’s rich artistic tradition and in particular the influence of Renassiance painters such as Piero Della Francesca, is strong in his work.

The New School

The latest exhibition demonstrates how much Smart’s paintings are about composition as opposed to realism. By displaying fifteen of the artist’s studies for the new works alongside the finished paintings the viewer is invited to witness their evolution. Some of the studies reveal only minor modifications of colour or scale. However, it is fascinating to observe more dramatic changes such as his tendency to completely reverse the entire composition showing how far removed from reality his paintings really are. The painting titled La Barracca (2003) and its accompanying study is perhaps the most fascinating example of Smart’s ability to urbanise a non-urban landscape. What begins as a watercolour of a partially collapsing farm building on a rural road is altered into a deteriorating structure on a modern highway. The image has been completed with road markings, signs and a factory in the distance. This appears to be a commentary on the increasing urbanisation of the natural landscape.

Several paintings in the current exhibition are strikingly similar to works from earlier in his career. For example, the work The New School (2004) shares the name and basic composition of a 1989 Smart painting which appeared in the Art Gallery of New South Wales Jeffrey Smart Retrospective. The new painting has only minor differences from the earlier work. This repetition could be due to Smart’s obsession with composition as it could be inferred that he was unhappy with the original work and has attempted to solve compositional problems. However, to a more cynical viewer, the similarity of not only the subject but the composition of many works in the show could be read as representational of Smart’s catering to the art market and the endless demand for his paintings.

The twelve finished oil paintings in the exhibition are classic Smart in terms of subject matter. Those viewers that are familiar with his work will take pleasure in the instant recognition of his concrete highways, moody skies, luridly coloured street signs and lone city-dwellers. However, while you can continue to admire Smart’s technical skill, the exhibition is at times disappointing due to its inability to rival the originality of his earlier works.

Madeleine Hinchy

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Jeffrey Smart: Recent Paintings

Venue: Philip Bacon Galleries, Fortitiude Valley, Brisbane
Dates: To October 1, 2005

Note: In this review we have used small thumbnail images. Click on the images for a larger view.