JEFFREY SMART

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1973

Rudy Komon Gallery, Jeffrey Smart, 30 November - 31 December 1973, cat. 16

Edmund Capon, Jeffrey Smart: Retrospective, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1999, pp. 136, 209
Patrick Hutchings, Jeffrey Smart: Realism in Three Dimensions, in New Lugano Review, no. 8-9, 1976, p. 49
John McDonald, Jeffrey Smart: Paintings of the '70s and '80s, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1990, p. 38, illus. (Major work The Traveller, 1973, collection Queensland Art Gallery, p. 79, illus.)
Barry Pearce, Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 128
Peter Quartermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, South Yarra, 1983, pp. 73,113, no. 627
Elizabeth Riddell, 'A Painter of the Century', The Australian, 10 December 1973, p. 12

Exterior silver frame , beige cloth mat and white lacquered timber mount. Cleaned by David Stein, Sydney. Very good condition.
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Despite their evident structural discipline, Jeffrey Smart's plays of bright urban geometry and dark existential isolation rarely take place in centralised, certain settings. His is rather a world of transitory spaces, dystopian no-places: freeways, car parks, garages, bus stations. Such locations have no immediately recognisable architectural pattern, allowing the artist the freedom to construct his dynamic, even baroque spatialities.

The Traveller is a classic instance. In the present work, a study for the major painting of the same title in the Queensland Art Gallery, the actual world is defined only by sky and bitumen, two bands of darkness above and below the distant white box of an apartment building. The functional setting is evidenced by the two buses - one in sunshine and one in shadow - which occupy most of the painting's surface. The converging perspective lines of their panels and windows and painted stripes make the eye race into the picture until it is stopped by the open bus door, which establishes a place of pause, a change of pace, a midway flatness between distant building and forward picture plane. Here we also find the traveller himself, the bald middle-aged, paunchy Everyman familiar from many of Smart's paintings, including the famous Cahill Expressway, 1962.

Having taken in the human interest of the composition, only then do we begin to address the shadowed right-hand side of the picture, the warped, unpredictable movement of light on industrial surfaces metaphorically tracing the traveller's dark, wobbly, unanchored future. Patrick Hutchings has noted how 'the second bus both pictures and is a plane torsion; and the realism is so stunning that the cool, almost insolent manipulation of the flat picture surface may, for a moment, escape us.' ¹ The title of a similarly sited, slightly later painting, Hans Hoffmann and his shadow (at the bus stop), 1975 helps to clarify Smart's intentions here. The American Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffmann is celebrated for his advancing and receding slabs of paint, and an associated 'push-pull' theory of colour. Despite its monumental stillness, The Traveller is very much a painting about motion: the literal movement of urban transit and the pictorial movement of the eye across, into and out of the picture plane.

1. Hutchings, P., 'Jeffrey Smart: Realism in Three Dimensions', New Lugano Review, no. 8-9, 1976