JEFFREY SMART

Jeffrey Smart is rightly celebrated for his bright, bleak, airless visions of the late 20th century city.  An expatriate since 1964, Smart has found much of his subject matter in the modernisma, autostrade and pubblicità of his adopted Italian home. It should nevertheless be remembered that Smart was a mature artist of forty-two when he quit Australia for good, and that the roots of his geometric-pop-existential-realism are to be found in his native South Australia. The surreal architectures of Australian water towers, viaducts and gasometers, of caravan parks and playgrounds are important precedents for the flats, fences and factories, the garages and roadworks of his later, European paintings.

Indeed, there is a particular regional inflection in many of these early works. In the 1940s, as a bored schoolteacher and a keen plein-air landscapist, Smart would make regular escapes from Adelaide, sketching in places like Robe, Kapunda, Hawker and Cradock, often in company with his art school chum Jacqueline Hick.

The present work is the result of one such excursion, to the Yorke Peninsula. The small town of Port Germein lies some 250 km from Adelaide, on the east side of Spencer Gulf, just north of Port Pirie. A wheat shipping port, it is famous for its mile long pier - the longest wooden jetty in Australia.  And for not much else, it would seem from this painting. The picture consists mainly of a vast expanse of sand and a thin line of waves.  A puddle of sunshine from the foreground to the centre of the horizon illuminates the sea and the end of the pier, but the surrounding sky is storm dark. In the foreground a couple - possibly Smart and Hick themselves - sit on a bench beneath a town sign, he under his black umbrella, she silhouetted against hers, a polygonal red halo which provides a dramatic note of colour.  An empty dinghy lies on the empty beach.

As with much of Smart's work, Port Germein is carefully constructed within a net of compositional angles. The horizontal centre line of the picture bisects the woman's umbrella, while its vertical centre is almost exactly at the end of the pier. The boat is angled in such a way that its prow also points to that same constructed intersection of land, water and sky. The figure group is contained within a square determined according to Golden Section proportions, a compositional tactic that Smart absorbed from his teacher Dorrit Black. Finally, the strong upright of the 'Port Germein' signpost anchors the composition, a common device in Smart's work from the net-drying poles in Wallaroo (1951, National Gallery of Australia) to the surveyor's staff in The Dome (1977, private collection). Here the vertical is particularly carefully managed: its location is determined by drawing an angle from the bottom right corner to the top centre of the picture, then carrying this line as an arc to the bottom edge.

This moody, brooding work is a significant example of Smart's early painting. While its thick impasto and expressive fall of light are peculiar to his work of the 1940s and 1950s, the refinement of the composition and the surreal, pittura metafisica emptiness are clear pointers to the 'classic' Italian pictures of later years.

We are most grateful to Stephen Rogers for assistance in cataloguing this work.