Opinions and Emotions
demonstrated in
Jeffrey Smart’s Paintings
The Australian artist Dr Jeffrey Smart was often asked about his motives and the meaning of certain elements in his painting. Over the years, he claimed his only motive for painting was to create a surface of shapes and colours that would please the human eye. His paintings should be enjoyed more with the eyes than with the brain.
But he once made comments about his positive attitude towards the modern post-war Italy’s new suburbs and autostradas. The country to which he immigrated in September 1964 was not the same Italy as had been seen in the neo-realistic Italian black and white films of the 50s and early 60s. (Roberto Rosselini’s Roma città Aperta, Federico Fellini’s La Strada, La Dolce Vita and Otto e mezzo, Luciano Visconti’s Rocco e I suoi Fratelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma). He is quoted saying he “felt for the people”, whatever were his feelings.
Commentators classify Jeffrey Smart as a painter of the urban and suburban landscape. Based on the same paintings, he may also be described as a surrealist and a cubist. A possible dispute is purely academic. The Australian public loves his work and buy several of his most popular items as reproductions and other types of prints. Jeffrey Smart has been hung in many Australian homes.
I met Dr Smart rather exactly sixty years ago as ‘Jeff’ when he was a newcomer in Europe; we shared household under primitive conditions for three or four months. We travelled together and spent a week in Athens and met many of Jeff’s Australian friends. During my visits to Rome at several occasions at the end of the 60s, we met regularly. I am one of only twelve people to be honoured with a photo
at his grown-up years in his memoirs. So, I have been together with Jeff during various life-situations and seen him together with different kinds of people and I claim with certainty: Jeffrey Smart had strong views on life, the world, people and the arts. During over seventy years, he was free to fill his easel with whatever he wanted. Could he consistantly have prevented his strong emotions and opinions from creeping through his protective defenses to make their mark on his work? I doubt he could.
I have a PhD in social sciences and statistics and lectured during my professional life at Stockholm university. I have no education in art. In 2019, I published a book where Jeff plays a major part, but his painting is hardly touched upon in that book. My present view on Jeff’s work is naturally coloured by my personal relationship with the artist during my youth.
Jeffrey Smart’s paintings describe philosophy, world views, politicl fears, despair and maybe even compassion, an existential fear, emptiness, loneliness and lack of power. After discovering his atypical painting Piano at Night from 1984, I saw his work as I had never ventured to experience it before. I found that sensitivity and tension restrained by strict rules characterised much of his work. “I was controlled”, he said in a radio program on ABC Classics. “They controlled me”, he commente about his parents. When he got a bike, he tried to get away as far as possible. When he thought he would manage economically as an artist, he immigrated to Italy.
This report begins with a brief presentation of the object of inquiry. Then we venture into a closer look at the enigma surrounding the realist, surrealist and cubist work of Dr Jeffrey Smart. The comments will be on the content of his paintings, less on their structure or style.
A short personal introduction.
Frank Jeffrey Edson Smart was born in 1921 in Adelaide, South Australia, in a well-to-do family. His outgoing father lived big on mortgages. And he kept a mistress already when he married the mother. In his Memoir Not Quite Straight from 1976 (pp. 184-86), the artist describes how his mother tried to squeeze her child tight to herself. Later, he did all he could to stay as far away from her as possible. Soon after the war, he travelled to USA and to England and spent a time in France as a student in the cubist Fernand Leger’s school. Back in Australia, he appeared regularly in broadcasting and later in a TV series about art and made a living as an art teacher. Already as a teenager, he was recognised as an artist. But not until the age of forty-two, he tried to make his living as a professional artist.
Moving to Europe, he boarded P&O’s transatlantic ocean liner, the SS Arcadia, in Sydney in December 1963 for a month-long voyage to London. The first days of September 1964, he ended up in Rome with his long-time artist companion Justin O’Brien, to begin his new life as a full-time artist. But not until the early 1970s, he stood on his own feet economically. His success as an artist grew with increasing revenues and a steady recognition as one of Australia’s more popular and well reputable artists. In 2011, he received an Honorary Doctorate in the University of South Australia, and he died 91 years old 2013 in Tuscany. For almost fifty years, he lived in Italy, where he produced most of his great number of paintings.
The first self-portrait, probably painted 1940, shows Jeffrey as a disturbed teenager, with an insecure and almost frightened look and a misconception of at least his minute chin. Here it looks normally manly and not worth mentioning. He never had a chin like that, which caused him distress for at least another twenty years. He wanted to get away from his home and from Australia. His bicycle did not carry him far enough. Europe was burning, and the Japanese were a threat everywhere not far away. He was ‘controlled’, as he said, not only in his family. One may see this self-portrait as an accurate and honest picture of young Jeffrey, since he let this painting be printed on the back cover of his Memoir from 1976. By the side, a more realistic version in the detail from his Self Portrait, Procida from 1957, hence at a more mature age.
The self-portrait from a detail of The Dampier II shows Jeff as ironic or self-critical. This is one of three similar paintings from the same period, named The Dampier I, II and III. In the other two, the poor clown is sitting on one of the slippery stones, looking at the spectator. He wears a white “priesthood” shirt and the silly hat they gave to a student
deemed to behave like an idiot. All three paintings were exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in London in February 1967. I was invited to that inauguration. When I saw these clowns on both the front and back cover of the black and white invitation booklet, I wasn’t sure Jeff really wanted me to be there. I was glad to see he had managed to get an exhibition in London. But I was sad to see his exposure of a self-criticism or at least self-doubt that I found alien for the Jeff I knew. Had his relationship with Ian begun to crack after almost exactly two years of cohabitation? He’s the young man in the painting whom Jeff seems to only half-heartedly offer nothing but the dark sea.
The self-portrait from 1993, and hence a more mature age, suffers from the same self-misconception as the one from his youth. I am also surprised to see a beard. When I was nineteen and had a tiny beard and a thin moustache, Jeff claimed I looked ridiculous and suggested the beard played the role of a misplaced compensation. So, he changed his mind? Interesting. Notice the resemblance between his self-portrait and his drawing of Clive James and why not also with a photo of myself at sixty-four.