JEFFREY SMART

Jeffrey Smart's paintings from this year are comparatively rare. He had moved to Sydney the previous year, living first in Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, followed by Elizabeth Bay Road. At the ABC he took up the role of 'Phidias' in the very popular radio program 'The Argonauts Club', becoming art critic for The Daily Telegraph in 1952 and holding a joint exhibition at David Jones' Art Gallery with fellow Adelaidian, Jacqueline Hick. These and other activities left little time for painting. His few surviving works of 1952, such as Façade by the Sea are largely Sydney-based. The building to the left of the composition is one he drew in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, which, Smart said, 'served him well for several paintings'.¹ While the ink study includes three buildings, he chose only one for the painting, the changes, especially allowing a view of the sky through the windows adding to its surrealist effect. This, together with the isolation of images, almost bizarre in their non-association, provide an early example of Smart's masterly engagement with the enigmatic. However, the shadowed figure and the youthful one in the blue bathing costume seem straightforward. Smart, of course, was to claim later that figures are provided only for scale – 'You have to be very careful because as soon as you put a figure in a painting the viewer's eye goes straight to it, like a magnet. So I try not to make them too interesting; they are never beautiful or sexy'.²  He leaves that to his colours and compositional balance, this painting providing a tantalising foretaste of the pleasures to come.

1. Jeffrey Smart, quoted in Capon E. et al., Jeffrey Smart: Drawings and Studies 1942-2001, Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney, 2001, p. 52.
2. Smart quoted in Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, p. 92, when referring to his painting, The Cahill Expressway, 1962.

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