Master at the art of geometry
Jeffrey Smart’s meticulously created urban depictions are an absorbing lesson in compositional dynamics.
Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) had a flair for attracting writers to his work. Not the copywriters of the arts business who fill catalogues with bland promotional stodge served up with the ideological or theoretical sauce of the day, but real writers and critics. He knew the publication of paintings in books made them seem more real and enduring to many collectors, but also that the inclusion of considered and thoughtful writing contributed to building a longer-term appreciation of an artistic oeuvre.
Thus over the years Smart invited Peter Quartermaine, John McDonald, Germaine Greer, David Malouf, Edmund Capon, Barry Pearce and others to write about his work.
Early in 2006, he called me to ask if I would be interested in writing another book about his work. I laughed at first and asked him how many books he needed. But he said that most of those published so far had reproduced the same well-known pictures, and that there were many more that deserved attention. We decided to include only paintings of substantial interest that had not been reproduced in colour in any of the major monographs or public exhibition catalogues: just over 100 works eventually formed the book Jeffrey Smart: Unpublished Paintings 1940-2007.
Writing the book was an opportunity to ponder more deeply questions I had touched on in reviews, including the nature and meaning of Smart’s subject matter, his approach to making pictures, and his use of geometry in composition. These themes are relevant to the present exhibition, and are sometimes easier to understand with the addition of the drawings donated to the Art Gallery of NSW by Smart’s partner Ermes De Zan.
To anyone unfamiliar with Smart’s paintings, the world he conjures must seem mysterious and rather disturbing. It is an overwhelmingly urban environment, dominated by roads, trucks, apartment blocks, walls and barriers, and scattered with traffic signs and other silent visual commands that hint at an omnipresent but anonymous system of authority.
In some of his early works, the tensions of this world are more explicit, even if its characteristic themes and motifs are not as developed as they will become in the mature paintings. In The Stilt Race (1960), for example, he has not yet found the vast and faceless blocks of flats that he would encounter in Italy. We can, however, see he is already anticipating them: for the banal suburban block in the background is playing the same role both in closing off the perspective of the picture and as a symbol of a residence that is devoid of homeliness.
Smart has already discovered the dark skies and the low afternoon light coming under the clouds and casting long shadows that help to evoke a sense of threat and alienation in his compositions, although, loath to be drawn into earnest social commentary and ideological chatter, he evaded this line of questioning in interviews by claiming dark skies simply enhanced composition. And he was right to avoid tendentious commentary, for pictures must say what they mean in their own terms.
The motif of a road going nowhere, curving away to an unseen destination — a structure already present in his very early Keswick siding (1945) — is underscored by the serpentine road divider. The foreground is occupied by a pedestrian crossing, while in the centre, a post, brightly lit one face, divides the composition in two, and bears a traffic sign warning cars of a turn to the left. On the right, as though ignoring the arrow pointing in the opposite direction, the surreal figures of the stilt walkers totter towards us, vaguely Beckett-like embodiments of aimless determination. Two other subliminally disturbing motifs in this side of the picture, which may easily escape the viewer, are a billboard facing away from us so that we cannot see what it is declaring or enjoining; and the cast shadow of a building outside the composition on the right.
On the left, sitting on a bank, a young woman looks on. Smart would often brush off questions about the significance of his figures by saying they served the purposes of composition, for the eye is always drawn to a human image, and it is certainly true that he uses the placement of figures to alter the compositional dynamics of pictures. In his later years he would often exhibit studies for major compositions alongside the final version, with figures occupying different positions in each case.
Smart’s people also have a variety of other functions: they can be more or less explicitly erotic in some of his early work — here in Surfers, Bondi (1963), in the picture of young men with their phallic boards — or they can be menacing, ambivalent, or subservient to the urban environment (like his later road workers).
Here the young woman on the bank plays the classic role of witness, a figure who gives viewers a cue as to how to respond to the scene before them.
But there is more. Smart had long been fascinated, like artists and architects before and after him, by the geometry of the golden section. This refers to the single point at which any length can be cut or divided in such a way that the ratio of the short part to the long is equal to that of the long to the whole. That ratio is 1:1.618, so that .618 is to 1 as 1 is to 1.618. This is close to the ratio of 3:5, which is why Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is an illustration of the golden section: eight heads high, with midpoint at the pubic bone and the golden section at the navel.
The golden section can also be used as the format of a rectangle, where the short side is to the long as the long is to their combined length, as is the case here.
All rectangles can be divided into a square and a supplement, but the golden rectangle has the unique property that the supplement itself retains the proportions of the golden rectangle and can continue to be subdivided in this way: this is the origin of the spira mirabilis or logarithmic spiral, found in the nautilus shell and elsewhere in nature.
Here, the composition is dramatically bisected by the white post already mentioned, and it is notable that while the observer figure is in the main square, the two surreal figures are consigned to the secondary space on the right. But although the long side of the frame is indeed divided according to the golden section — this is distinct from whether the rectangle itself is golden or not — the division is not actually at the post, but along the right side of the building, thus leaving the composition as a whole feeling rather unsettled.
In case all this geometry seems rather arcane and abstruse, it is even more explicitly and significantly the basis of Truck and trailer approaching a city (1973). In subject, this exemplifies the urban world that Smart developed in Italy as his distillation of the modern experience: the picture is dominated by the huge shape of a truck driving towards a line of apartment blocks that fills the horizon. The inscription traslochi tells us that it is a removalist truck carrying someone’s personal effects to the place they have to make their new home.
Formally, the picture was a challenge because it has the proportions of a double square — in other words, an exception to the general rule mentioned above that paintings are a square plus some addition that is less than a square.
The double square tends to fall apart, visually, into two squares, and here Smart has added to the difficulty by emphasising the midpoint of the composition, which coincides with the corner of the trailer that juts towards us, with light on one side and shade on the other for good measure.
He resolves this tension, though, and reunifies the composition, by setting the golden section at the left side of the red trailer, where it meets the yellow body of the truck itself, which incidentally means the shadow side of the trailer is equivalent to about 1/8th of the width of the composition.
The same geometric principles are at work in the late painting, Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum (1994-95). Preparatory drawings show the artist thinking through the composition and its proportions; in the end result, there is a clear compositional break at the corner of the room, but the real golden section division is at the point where the cornice meets the top of the painting, leaving the figure of Olley standing in the supplement, but also the still point of the composition, the area not animated by the dynamism of perspective.
The column seen through the far doorway, meanwhile, repeats the proportion and, like a musical leitmotif, gives us a clue to look for the boundary of the main composition on the left.
Indeed all of this formal compositional play reflects Smart’s love of music, and it reminds us of the abstract qualities of his work, which often emphasises flat areas of colour. And yet Smart despised abstract art and more or less subtly lampooned it in a number of works. His painting, he felt, could have all the formal qualities of abstraction but with the far greater depth and richness that comes from reference to the world of experience.
His late painting Matisse at Ashford (2004), also divided by the golden section on the left, is not, as we may assume, contrasting the banality of everyday life and the sterile apartment blocks in the background with the aesthetic freedom of Matisse.
Smart considered these forms facile and spiritually barren, so the subject of the picture is, rather, the mirage of freedom and spontaneity that modern art offers to people like the commuters seen behind, caught up in a life of routine and constraint.
Smart was never facile or careless. As I have tried to show, these pictures are complex both thematically and formally. And they were always carefully planned and prepared.
One of the pleasures of this little exhibition is the insight into Smart’s process that the many studies offer the viewer. The idea for a painting may arise suddenly, perhaps from something glimpsed from a car or train window, and sketches record those first thoughts; but then we see how the artist shapes the composition, how he researches and studies particular motifs, has models pose for the principal figures, until all comes together in a whole that is still and resolved.
Jeffrey Smart: constructed world
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until July 21
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