Jeffrey Smart (ATOM Study Guide)

If a good painting comes off, it has a stillness, it has a perfection, and that's as great as anything that a musician or a poet can do.
– Jeffrey Smart

I find it funny that perhaps in 100 years time, if people look at paintings done by the artists of this century, of our century, that the most ubiquitous things, like motor cars and television sets and telephones, don't appear in any of the pictures. We should paint the things around us. Motor cars are very beautiful. I'm a great admirer of Giorgio Morandi – we all love Morandi – and he had all his props, his different bottles and his things. See, my props are petrol stations and trucks and it's just the same thing. It's a different range of things.
– Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart (Catherine Hunter, 2022) sheds light on the early influences of one of our greatest painters. Born in Adelaide in 1921, Smart's early years were spent discovering the back lanes of the city's inner suburbs. His last work Labyrinth (2011) evokes these memories.

It is also a kind of arrival at the painting he was always chasing, never satisfied, hoping the next one on the easel would be the elusive masterpiece, the one that said it all. In this sense, Labyrinth brings a full stop to his career, and at the same time makes for a full, perpetual circle within his life.
– Barry Pearce, Emeritus Curator, Art Gallery of NSW

In 2021, a major exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Australian celebrating the centenary of Jeffrey Smart’s birth. It was a chance to take a fresh look at the work of one of the most important painters of 20th century Australia. Smart died in 2013 at the age of 91.

A one-time teacher in Adelaide, Jeffrey Smart was always drawn to the idea of living in Italy. In 1951, he left Adelaide for Sydney where he became famous as Phidias in the ABC's Argonauts Club and art critic on the Children's Hour. He moved to Italy in the early 1960s and  lived there for the rest of his life.

It was in Italy that the colours, shapes and designs of a country rebuilding itself after the war inspired a new vernacular of modern painting for Smart. Street signs, apartment blocks, and construction sites became his subject matter.

He confronted this universe of technology and architecture anywhere his travels took him, declaring it was beautiful, and became its most passionate poet …
– Barry Pearce.

Curriculum Guidelines

Jeffrey Smart would be an excellent film to show to secondary and tertiary students of:

• Visual Arts
• Studio Arts
• Design
• Fine Arts

It would also be valuable for students of Culture and Society and Biography.

At the same time, Media Studies students could study the structure and editing of the film as a model of clarity and conciseness.

In an hour we learn a great deal about the late artist, his work and the places, people and experiences that have shaped his art.