Jeffrey Smart is Australia's pre-eminent painter of the contemporary world, though distinguished from realism by a stringent theoretical base and sure grasp of painterly tradition. Born in Adelaide on 2 July 1921, his first ambition was to be an architect, and though he eventually trained as an artist his love of the created environment has remained. He taught art in Adelaide from 1941 until 1948, when he left Australia for London, travelling via the United States. In 1949 he studied under Fernand Leger in Paris, at the Académie de Montmartre, and also at Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

 

He returned to Australia in 1952, and worked as art critic for the Sydney Daily Telegraph until 1954, while also establishing a considerable reputation as 'Phidias' on ABC radio programs for children. Not until 1964 was he able to devote himself entirely to painting, when he made the move to Italy, where he lived for the rest of his life. Smart's work has attracted comparisons with Giorgio De Chirico, Edward Hopper and later realist painters. The 'Wasteland' images of TS Eliot, influential for many Australian painters during the 1930s and 40s, are also frequently cited as influences. (Smart's composite figure of 'Mr TS Eugenides' acknowledges the poet's importance for him.) It is, though, the spiritual and compositional concerns of Eliot's 'Four Quartets' that inform Smart's work, which draws upon the example of painters as diverse as Poussin, Cézanne and, above all others, Piero della Francesca.

 

In almost any of Jeffrey Smart's paintings, whatever the apparent content, certain formal qualities will be present. The artist is absorbed in explorations of shape, balance, colour and, above all, light. Through relationships of form, Smart searches for a stillness at the centre of human connections with urban landscapes in compositions which, however their elements may vary, are instantly recognisable transcriptions of his concerns. At the core of Smart's work is the effort to reach, through craft and metaphysics, 'that completely static quality which I regard as an indication of great painting'. Smart paints to discover the poetic survivals of life in the twentieth-century urban environment.

 

In The reservoir, Centennial Park there is an underlying seriousness of purpose which is playfully counterpointed. The isolated figure which has appeared in his paintings for decades is here that of a woman, weighed down by a heavy bag and the immediate prospect of a further steep climb. The primary colours and bright hues of her bag and the clothes of the runners who bound up the steps and stream along the crest of the embankment, while contrasting with the severities of the environment, also draw the eye along the parallels and angles, the thrusting verticals and horizontals of the composition. Smart's interests in formal placements, in a nice balance — in the 'golden mean' in fact — are quickly apparent.

 

Particular elements and moods recur in Smart's works and other elements of The reservoir, Centennial Park are familiar from the painter's previous work: a small 'discovered landscape' in the background (here of trees and ubiquitous apartment buildings); dramatic sky effects; and grassy middle and foreground, reminiscent of some of Smart's 1970s landscapes, in which both grass and perspectives of distance are handled ambiguously.

 

We are aware of the confident paring away of unnecessary detail that is typical of Smart's later career. It is a continuation and development of his absorption, as a student with Fernard Leger in Paris in 1949, with 'clean-cut shapes and sharp edges'.

 

The paintings of Jeffrey Smart offer dislocations of perspective, distance and easy associations which compel us to look more closely at our citified environments.