Smart choice for a retrospective of one of Australia's greatest painters

JEFFREY Smart's oeuvre has become a meditation on a repertoire of themes that have allowed him to develop consistently through many years.

Morning, Yarragon Siding

THE first retrospective of Jeffrey Smart's work was held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1999 and subsequently toured to the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery and Heide in Melbourne.

It was originally intended to be a small-scale exhibition, which Edmund Capon, the AGNSW director, had entrusted to Barry Pearce, curator of Australian art.

However Capon then decided Smart was more important than that, expanded the scope of the exhibition and took over the role of curator. In hindsight, it seems hard to understand that a figure of Smart's stature - recognised as among the most important living Australian artists - should have been considered suitable for a project space show, and that he should have to wait for a retrospective until the end of the century.

These anomalies are symptoms of the headwinds that long impeded a proper appreciation of Smart's achievement.

The first of these was the long vogue of abstraction. The beginning of Smart's career coincided with the post-war sensation of American action painting and the endless varieties of European gestural and matter painting, with their retinue of Australian imitators. Abstraction was well matched to a booming art market. Art really was easy after all; exhibitions could be churned out in a few weeks of frenzied work, and serial production meant such exhibitions were frequently no more than one idea, pattern or texture, repeated in different colour combinations.

It was a hard time for someone who painted pictures carefully and methodically, and thought of each one as an individual work with its own problems and aesthetic interest. But it only got harder after the market for abstraction collapsed with the so-called death of painting in the 1970s and then the climate of postmodernism that dominated the last decades of the century. The disorientation and even cynicism that have afflicted painting in recent decades were epitomised in the recent juxtaposition at the AGNSW of two pictures that represent opposite abuses of the art: the grunge mannerism of the late Adam Cullen and the cloying slickness of the picture by Michael Zavros that was recently given the Bulgari Art Award - all too appropriately matching kitsch art product to consumer bling. The contemporary art establishment, it seems, will embrace any simplistic extreme but has a blind spot for the real and risky work of the painter in encountering and yet transforming a world outside the mind.

In any case, Pearce has finally had a chance to mount a retrospective - accompanied by a fine book - this time in Smart's native Adelaide. Another surprise: one might have expected an exhibition of this importance to be at the Art Gallery of South Australia, but it is in fact divided between Carrick Hill and the Samstag Museum in the city. This is logistically awkward, but there is some sense in showing the artist's youthful work at Carrick Hill, for it was in the home of Edward and Ursula Hayward that he first found himself surrounded by pictures, books and people who valued culture. One has to smile, however, at the assertions in the exhibition, of Smart's attachment to the city of his birth.

The interest in studying an artist's early work lies in witnessing the emergence and maturation of distinctive themes and sensibility. A vocation is not given all at once but discovered on a journey from the periphery to the centre; that journey may be longer or shorter depending on the more or less favourable circumstances in which the individual arises. Prodigies are artists in whom extraordinary gifts are matched with an environment that trains, disciplines, nurtures and appreciates them. For others, their genius consists in finding a way through less well-marked terrain or even through an obstacle course of contrary influences.

In Smart's youthful pictures, we can see some signs of his later interest in urban and industrial subjects, although he is first drawn to the abandoned and the derelict, such as the empty bank building in The Wasteland II (1945), painted when he was only 24 and which attests to the powerful inspiration of the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which was to remain important throughout his career.

In Kapunda Mines (1946), an obsolete industrial edifice, portentous in form but unclear in function, serves as the background for a group of bathing boys, a subject that recurs in later pictures too. These early years culminate in an ambitious composition that involves figures and a landscape with buildings, Wallaroo (1951), which won the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize.

As much as anything else, it is the seriousness of the young artist's method that is impressively demonstrated in the exhibition: there is a fine watercolour of the two buildings that were used in the background, another watercolour of the whole composition, and a pencil study of a model in the attitude of the foreground figure.

Smart's subsequent evolution in Sydney and then Italy continues at Samstag. There we see the slightly gothic theme of the derelict house give way to the more dispassionate, affectless urban environment of the painter's maturity. In parallel with this development, the painterly surface of the early work, akin to organic textures of Drysdale, for example, also disappears in favour of a smooth, impassive finish, while warm earth colours are replaced by artificial urban ones and punctuated by motifs painted in bright primaries. It is a tendency in keeping with and perhaps inspired by Eliot's discussion of the impersonality of the artist in an important 1919 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent .

That process is almost complete in what remains perhaps Smart's best-known painting, Cahill Expressway (1962). The composition, set on the expressway near the State Library in Sydney, is like a modern interpretation of The Choice of Hercules - as most famously painted by Annibale Carracci in 1596 (Naples, Capodimonte) - in which the young hero chooses between virtue and pleasure.

Here the mysterious one-armed figure stands before an implicit choice between the road that leads down into darkness and the other that leads up to the statue, which Sydneysiders will recognise as the Shakespeare monument. Only Smart has made a significant change: the upraised arm of the poet is his own invention, and of course it is the missing limb that the man in the suit must ascend the road of achievement to recover.

That road led him to Italy in the following year, where he found a modern urban environment that furnished his imagination with subjects, and the example of great figures in the history of painting such as Piero della Francesca, who helped him to remain aloof from the futile infatuations of the contemporary art world in Australia. From the distance of Rome and then finally Tuscany, Smart cast an ironic eye on the machinations of the Sydney art world, as we can see in Art Gallery in a Shopping Arcade (1985), which satirises two of its cultural impresarios; the same picture is also a tongue-in-cheek demonstration that the painter can do a Heysen or a Mondrian as he pleases, or even both at once.

There are several jokes about abstraction in Smart's painting, but the more important implication is that he can give the viewer everything that abstraction can - the colour fields, the flat surfaces and so on - but with all the meaning of the real world as well. Morning, Yarragon Siding (1983-84) plays on this ambiguity between abstract and referential, while the figure on the right, another hint at a self-portrait, is concealed behind the newspaper he is reading like an image of Eliot's artist who disappears behind his work.

Smart's oeuvre, meanwhile, becomes a meditation on a repertoire of themes that have allowed him to develop consistently through many years, without ever falling into the trap of serial production. His world is an imaginary one composed of cities and rows of faceless apartment blocks, but above all of roads and highways that lead from place to place, the trucks that transport things and, later, the containers in which goods are transported, as well as the signs, markings and directions that ensure movement and circulation around these networks of social connection.

He has a cast of characters as well, starting, in the Sydney period, with erotically charged figures such as the naked boy in the shadow of the bathing hut in San Cataldo (1964), and then the series of bald figures in suits who, as with the one-armed man in Cahill Expressway, are alter egos of the artist, sometimes in the part of master, sometimes of observer, and sometimes in more ambiguous and vulnerable roles. The later pictures are increasingly populated by workers and figures in overalls who maintain rather than direct the operation of the city. Workers cluster around containers or trucks on the roadside; sociability takes place at the margins of circulation. In The Cleaners (2004), the men in orange overalls are cleaning the enormous chevrons that direct traffic to turn at a bend in the road; although Smart has no interest in making political points, his subject matter has led him, by virtue of its own logic, to a suggestive image of humanity as the servants of our own systems.

Ever impersonal, however, Smart is overtly concerned only with composition and structure, which I discussed in my 2008 book Jeffrey Smart: Unpublished Paintings, 1940-2007.

It is perhaps for this reason that he is so fond of a seldom-seen picture, Morning Practice, Baia (1969), an enigmatic image of a man lying on his back and juggling a cube with his feet - a kind of allegory, it seems, of the artist juggling with pictorial geometry.

At 91, Smart, perhaps our greatest living painter, has retired from the brush, but not before completing one last and enigmatic work, a picture of a labyrinth or maze in the middle of which stands the little figure of H. G. Wells, turning back towards us. An oeuvre devoted to roads, movement and the idea of circulation gives special poignancy to a motif in which all pathways seem to close up into a tangle; but the image is inherently ambiguous, as a mutual friend observed to me.

Does it represent a collapse into entropy or the stillness of fulfilment? Is the figure lost or is he at the centre - at the heart of the labyrinth and the conclusion of the artist's long journey towards the source his inspiration?

Jeffrey Smart: Master of Stillness, Samstag Museum, Adelaide, to December 14; Carrick Hill, Springfield, Adelaide, to February 24, 2013. The Samstag Museum's Master of Stillness will tour to TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, December 21 to March 31.