Jeffrey Smart

Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane
Mr Basil Sellers AM, Sydney; purchased from the above

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 17 April-12 May 1986, cat. 7
Jeffrey Smart, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 3-21 November 1987, cat. 23
The Angelic Space, Monash University Art Gallery, 15 October-28 November 1992, cat. 20 (bears label on reverse)
Jeffrey Smart, Philip Bacon Galleries, 22 October-23 November 1996, cat. 35

Rosslyn Beeby, 'Kicked off by the light', Age, 23 April 1986, p. 14
Harriet Edquist and Juliana Engberg, The angelic space: a celebration of Piero della Francesca, Melbourne: Monash University Art Gallery, 1992, p. 45 (illus.)
John McDonald, Jeffrey Smart: paintings of the '70s and '80s, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1990, pp. 126, 127 (illus.), 161 (cat. 287)
Jeffrey Smart, Brisbane: Philip Bacon Galleries, 1996, (illus.)

This work is not lined and has the original stretcher. There are two minor stress cracks to the lower left hand corner approximately 3cm in length each, there are several smaller lines of stress cracking to the roof of the building (upper centre) and two lines of stress cracking (right hand corner) approximately 7cm in length each; there is one further fine line of stress cracking running along the top edge of the painting. UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching or restoration.
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Jeffrey Smart is famous for his images of urban alienation and almost as famous for denying that they are any such thing. Despite the often lowering grey-bitumen skies, despite the hard edges and garish colours of commerce, despite the isolation, fatigue or age of his figures, Smart's paintings are far from pessimistic. Rather, they are ironic celebrations of modernity, momentary visions or glimpses of the beauty and oddity to be found within the 20th century urban environment. At one level, these tableaux of figures in streetscapes and highwayscapes, signscapes and junkscapes are simply humanised abstractions, or populated geometries. A devotee of the Greeks (he was 'Phidias', the art man, on ABC radio's 'Argonauts' children's program), Smart has always been alert to matters of proportion and construction, and the classicism, the 'slowness', the lasting aesthetic interest of his paintings owes a great deal to their play with the 'golden section' and other proportional harmonics.

In a well-known Art and Australia article of 1985, Peter Quartermaine reproduces a diagrammatic analysis of the first version of The terrace, Madrid Airport which provides the keys to understanding the structure of the present work. Firstly, it points to the 'rotational symmetry' of the work. Not simply a foursquare, rectilinear arrangement, the geometry of the composition is enlivened by a pattern of repeated 30-degree right-angle triangles: the two aeroplane tails, with their strong, heraldic design (plus a tiny third one on the aircraft taxiing in the distance); the hole in the roof and the pile of rubble beneath it; even the body (the lines of back and legs) of the alarmed male witness on the left. Furthermore, the lines of roof, windows, paving and edges of shadows pick up on this angularity, making the single-point perspective grid twist or spin slightly, clockwise. At the same time, all these angularities are locked together by a secondary armature of parallel lines, of form echoing form. The affective result of this careful construction is a feeling of simultaneous dynamism and stasis, of contemporary, journalistically-recorded incident – Smart did indeed see just such a piece of fallen masonry at the airport¹ - within a framework as rigid as that of a medieval altarpiece or a Renaissance Ideal City.

The terrace, Madrid Airport II is both more complex and more cunning than the earlier version. There are now two additional, female figures, one reflected in the windows on the right, there are two 'plane tails, and their graphics are simpler and more emphatic, there is a neater hole in the roof, and the pile of fallen masonry is smaller and less central, less dominant. The painting is quietly harmonious in colour, the greys of sky and shadowed terrace enlivened only with primary red, blue and yellow, and a small flash of white. The artist has declared himself 'particularly pleased with the distant lights at the edge of the aerodrome.'²  Not only do they make a witty 'fold along the dotted line' horizon, but their golden points of light return the eye, via the constellation of ochre pebble dots, to the picture's narrative and formal source: that sudden unexpected triangle of the sky falling down.

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

1.  Letter, Jeffrey Smart to Stephen Rogers, 24 September 2009
2.  ibid.