JEFFREY SMART

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label on reverse)
Private collection, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; gift from the above

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1 - 29 May 1989, cat. 7

John McDonald, Jeffrey Smart: paintings of the 70s and 80s, Craftsmen House, Roseville, 1990, p. 162, no. 337

Reverse is sealed in frame. Overall, in good condition. UV examination reveals small retouch on right centre margin, possibly by the artist.
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Stairs are a recurrent motif in the work of Jeffrey Smart, from the vertiginous, empty stone mountain of The Steps (1967, The University of Sydney) to the surreal, linear pink spiral of Jacob Descending (1979, private collection). Like fences, road signs, and hillsides, the staircase provides the artist with an infinitely flexible yet always apparently logical geometric device. It is not only a means of achieving his favoured high horizon, but it also establishes a steady perspectival stave within which he can dispose his notes of human and/or chromatic interest. It also appears to satisfy a strong innate pleasure in parallel lines, an aesthetic preference which is every bit as strong in Smart's 'naturalism' – in his slatted shutters, corrugated iron fences, rows of seats, road markings and so on – as it is in the abstract stripe paintings of Barnett Newman or Kenneth Noland. At the same time, the staircase provides a narrative setting with a powerful metaphorical resonance, an archetype of the rise and fall, elation and despair, ascent and damnation of all our lives.

In the present work, a study for the major painting in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Smart shows the Centennial Park reservoir's golden grassy slope – another favourite motif, familiar from such works as Cooper Park I (1962, private collection) and The Listeners (1965, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery) – against a grey, bruised sky. Linking earth and heaven is the diagonal of a line of concrete steps, the columns at their apex strongly suggesting some ritual or processional function. However, the supremely ironic Smart immediately undercuts any portentousness by his choice of figures, here a loose straggle of amateur athletes jogging up the stairs and along the summit path, and by the suburban detail of the apartment buildings bottom right. In the final, larger version, the jogger in the red t-shirt and blue shorts is replaced by an even more humble figure, a woman carrying a bag of shopping.

There is something divine, however, in the composition. Like so many of Smart's works, the painting is structured in accordance with the 'Golden Section'. The point of proportional vertical division is here just at the point where the clouds divide to reveal a patch of blue: the light of heaven descends down the line of the distant column to bless the runner who is coming last.

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