Jeffrey Smart show at National Gallery of Australia brilliant
In this first significant survey of Jeffrey Smart’s work since his death, his importance as one of the greatest Australian painters of the post-war period should be clearer than ever.
In the first line of his sonnet on the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe (1877) – “tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change” – Mallarmé implies that death makes us at last into who we really are, and gives a definitive shape to our life and work. Until then the process remains open, although Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) had already in 2011, in his typically deliberate but enigmatic way, marked the end of his career with a painting of a man standing in the centre of a labyrinth of his own creation.
In this first significant survey of Smart’s work since his death – and in the centenary of his birth – we can appreciate perhaps more clearly than ever the origins of the artist’s vision, and his importance as one of the greatest Australian painters of the post-war period should be clearer than ever. So many other artists of this period are now little more than representatives of some style or mode; Smart emerges as one of the small handful of enduring figures whose paintings remain individual and irreducible poetic creations.
This is a beautiful and impressive exhibition on a scale big enough to suggest the range and complexity of Smart’s work. There are naturally some important and occasionally puzzling omissions, but there are also pictures from private collections that most people will not have seen. The greatest virtue of the display is its visual sensitivity; it is intuitive rather than intellectually ambitious, an exhibition to awaken our interest in the artist, if not yet the definitive Jeffrey Smart exhibition.
The early work from Adelaide shows a young artist feeling his way towards what he needs to say; he is drawn to certain motifs, particularly to disused buildings, to empty space, signs of dereliction and abandonment. Like so many young artists of his generation, he was inspired by T.S. Eliot, who was to remain a lifelong inspiration. His early painting The Waste Land II (1945) has a solid Victorian building – a bank, if we look more carefully – marooned in what looks like a ghost town.
Abandoned or obsolete buildings appear also in Kapunda Mines (1946) and Wallaroo (1951) which dimly anticipate the ambiguous relation of figures to the built environment in Smart’s mature work. Holiday Resort (1946) has almost no buildings, but an eerie mood composed of several elements that Smart amusingly describes in the accompanying video. The pram in the foreground reminds us of a fundamental principle in his work: that every motif – like every figure – that he introduces into a picture has both a compositional function and an inherent meaning.
The masterpiece of his early maturity is Cahill Expressway (1962); it is here that he discovers the theme of roads and cities, or more precisely modern urban expressways and residential tower blocks, that would become such an important inspiration in Italy but which were then still rare in Australia. And this picture is also a reminder of the importance of figures in Smart’s painting; there has been much speculation about the supposed identity of the fat, bald man, but the most salient point is that he is maimed, missing an arm, while directly above him the sculpted figure has a raised arm which the original Shakespeare Memorial does not. A pencil study shows that Smart considered giving the statue two raised arms, but a single one makes the connection with the fat man’s missing arm more pointed.
This example perfectly illustrates the care that Smart took with every element and motif in his paintings. At the same time, as I observed a few weeks ago, he would never talk about the meaning of his pictures and could even be deliberately evasive when asked about his choice of subjects, because he did not want to endorse reductive interpretations of his work.
Of course Smart’s chosen subjects have meanings; things like roads, walls, fences, tower blocks, removalists’ trucks, enclosed or open spaces, doors and windows, the sky and the sea have resonance and connotations whether we like it or not. Smart was well aware of this, but he wanted those meanings to have free play in his and our imagination rather than be prematurely decoded and reduced to the predigested banalities of social commentary.
In Italy, he found not only escape from the parochial Australian art world, then obsessed with abstraction, but a combination of old and new that suited his inspiration: on the one hand the proximity of antiquity and the renaissance – he lived in an 18th-century farmhouse in the country near Arezzo – and on the other hand the impersonal artificial landscapes of expressways and mass apartment blocks that he took as images of the modern condition.
Not all of his buildings are modern tower blocks; there are older edifices in Rome, for example, especially from the period when he lived in the city before the move to Arezzo. These are seen from closer quarters than the tower blocks, which so often fill up the background. And here we may notice something else about Smart’s buildings: they are always seen from the outside, never – unlike Hopper whom he admired – from the inside. Windows are often shuttered; if figures appear, they lean out a window or stand on a balcony.
These older buildings make a striking contrast with the communication technology motifs that appear in several pictures of this period. The figures in Smart’s paintings are mostly alone, isolated, almost never visibly communing with each other; and yet in radio transmitters, as in roadways and later in underground cables, we are reminded of the vast networks of communication, logistics and even surveillance in the modern world, which control our social environment and yet do not seem to result in any kind of real human sociability.
There are thus strong dystopian themes in Smart’s work, but that is precisely why he was so intent on maintaining a detached perspective, avoiding anything that would muddy clear perception. Another important motif is the fence: in Waiting for the Train (1969-70), the tired commuters are hedged in behind the red fence of the foreground. Once you become alert to this motif you will see it everywhere: fences, railings and fence-like structures such as the tangles of metal spars or piping through which figures are seen in paintings such as Luxury Cruise (1972-73). An extreme case, and a perfect example of Smart’s studied equanimity, is Playground at Mondragone (1998) in which the climbing frame is a three-dimensional cage and the little girl is sitting behind bars in the background.
It is important to look closely at these pictures because Smart often puts in small details – especially inscriptions – which can be impossible to read in reproduction. Thus in Art Gallery in a Shopping Arcade (1985), a reference to the mediocrity of the Australian art world, we need to read not only the panel on the door but another on the right (“Mondrian & Co.”). In Ponte Testaccio (1975), the foreground is strewn with papers that turn out to be left-wing political pamphlets printed with the Italian words sciopero (strike), lavoratori (workers) and democrazia.
In the early painting The Steps, Palma (1965), the central column is painted with a huge advertisement for the Spanish Larios gin. On either side of the column are two female figures; at the lower end of the stairs, an older woman in black, slumped sullenly against the parapet, and at the top, on the upper left, a running girl who looks as though she belongs in some dramatic scene; and so she does – she is borrowed, reversed, from Poussin’s figure of Thisbe, discovering the body of Pyramus, in Poussin’s painting of 1651.
Smart would typically deflect public questions about his figures by saying that they were there mainly for the sake of composition, but of course there is much more to it than that, as he would sometimes admit in private conversation. There is no doubt the kind of figures in his paintings, as well as the role they play, evolves considerably over his career, from very distinct and strongly characterised ones in the early work to increasingly neutral ones in the later period; and yet this important question is barely addressed in the present exhibition.
The reason for this, I suspect, is that the early figures are often erotically charged, as in Waiting woman, Naples turn-off (1969-70), or the ambiguous Elizabeth Bay (1961), and more specifically homoerotic in such paintings as Rushcutters Bay Baths (1961), Coogee Baths, Winter (1962) or San Cataldo I (1964) – none of which is in the exhibition. The closest we come to this theme is The Gymnasium (1962); I remember once trying to explain a theory about the role of the man in the doorway to Smart when he laughed and said bluntly: “He’s a pervert!”
I suspect that in our current mood of sexual paranoia, stolen glimpses of handsome boys at the seaside or the swimming pool have become too risqué. This is a shame, because it also rules out a proper investigation of the rather menacing voyeur-observer figures in the earlier paintings – and all this means there is no context for appreciating the blander generic figures in overalls of the later period, or their own particular role, which is often in handling and servicing the ubiquitous traffic signs that are such a pervasive metaphor in Smart’s work.
This theme, too, is barely touched on, but the role of road markings, traffic arrows and many other semiotic markers and directors of urban circulation is central to compositions from as early as The stilt race (1960): they tell us to move and to stop, to turn and where to turn, to keep right or left; they are concrete symbols of a network of rules and conventions that hem in our daily existence.
It is in not tackling these more complex issues that the exhibition is ultimately intellectually unambitious and fails to do full justice to the complexity of Smart’s work.
The last room is visually impressive, full of paintings that are, as I observed before, well positioned and juxtaposed, and yet the overall idea behind this room (leaving aside the wall of portraits) is that Smart, while despising abstract painting, liked to paint flat-coloured motifs.
He thus demonstrated that he could do everything abstraction did and more, since his coloured surfaces were part of a world of real things; but these things are interesting because they have meanings.
This final room includes, but makes no attempt to distinguish between, walls, fences, trucks and road signage, all presented implicitly as flat patterns without any particular significance. But anyone who looks attentively at these paintings will see, even without prompting, that they evoke above all an image of humanity dwarfed by the very structures and systems we have built and which confine, restrict and direct our lives and consciousness.
Jeffrey Smart
National Gallery of Australia, until May 15
Jeffrey Smart
National Gallery of Australia, until May 15
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