JEFFREY SMART

Private company collection, Sydney

Jeffrey Smart, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 24 August - 5 September 1955, cat. 8, 16 gns

James Cook, 'Voice of the artist heard', Daily Telegraph, 24 August 1955, p. 4
Peter Quartermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 1983, p. 105, cat. 286

Good original condition, there appears to be general surface dirt, this work is framed with a large linen mount (discoloured) and wooden frame. There is no evidence of retouching through UV inspection.
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In the early 1950s Jeffrey Smart's quiet, careful, geometric classicism was somewhat unfashionable, particularly amongst his Sydney friends. The artist recalls:

'Both Jean [Bellette] and Paul [Haefliger] , and Tas Drysdale too, would all urge me to 'loosen up' – 'loosen up!' they would cry. They hated tight brushwork and when I tried to explain that was not what I wanted to do, we would have fierce arguments.

'The Haefligers and Drysdale were looking at painters like Manessier, Estève and Soulages in those days. I was searching out reproductions of Hopper, Balthus, Lucian Freud and Magritte...'¹

Indeed, Haefliger went so far as to rebuke the artist publicly, in his review of Smart's first one-man show in Sydney, finding there not 'fine draughtsmanship' but 'a general diagram', not 'concentrated... simplicity' but 'only emptiness.'²

James Gleeson, on the other hand, whose sensibility was already highly tuned to surrealist expressions, was delighted by the Macquarie Galleries show. Writing in The Sun, Gleeson successfully captured both the technical and affective essence of Smart's work, in phraseology which is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago:

'The formation of Jeffrey Smart's inspiration rises in the realms of romanticism but is quickly diverted into skilfully engineered channels of classicism... both mood and color belong to the romantic tradition, but it is a thoroughly 20^th century romanticism...

'Mr Smart prefers to imply the drama rather than actually state it. He is fascinated by those pauses between moments of action and by the silence that presages a crucial confession, an accusation or a bitter denial. Nothing is happening – everything is just about to happen – consequently there is an enigmatic element in these paintings and a tension that is unresolved by action...

'...a precision of placement and accent ... freezes movement into a series of strange tableaus [sic]. Indeed, one feels that geometry vies with the human figure as hero of these arrested dramas...'³

The 1955 exhibition was dominated by seaside and pavilion subjects, including such titles as The Upturned Boat, Net Carriers, Table by the Beach, Esplanade and Tamarama. The present work is another foreshore scene, ostensibly a commonplace holiday narrative, an image of a woman feeding seagulls on the beach. On closer examination, however, it softens into 'a plausibility that fails to convince', then dissolves into 'the vague sense of a half-dream state.'⁴ The composition is dominated by the mysterious foreground figure of a woman in red (wife? lover? daughter?), her arm outstretched in a rhetorical gesture that seems vaguely familiar from Graeco-Roman statuary, or Renaissance painting. The figure's stillness and her passive, pensive expression are as antinaturalistic as the banner, tents and peppermint-striped playground-lighthouse-smokestack behind her, as the pink-grey sand, the green-brown sky.

And yet there is something strangely convincing about the composition. As James Cook put it at the time: 'The sharp unreality  of... Smart's paintings may at first repel, but an unobtrusive, underlying insistence almost persuades that we, too, can remember that incidents, not unlike these, actually happened – a long time ago when we were near the sea.'⁵

1. Jeffrey Smart, Not Quite Straight: A Memoir, Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1996, p. 
2. Paul Haefliger, 'Paintings by Jeffrey Smart', Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1955, p. 2
3. James Gleeson, 'Artist Implies his Drama', The Sun, 24 August 1955, p. 53
4. James Cook, 'Voice of the artist heard', Daily Telegraph, 24 August 1955, p. 43
5. ibid.

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Stephen Rogers in cataloguing this work.