Jeffrey SMART

Australian 1921–2013
worked in Italy 1965–2013

Jeffrey Smart wrote in 1968: ‘I find myself moved by man in his new violent environment. I want to paint this beautifully and explicitly’. Having decided to live permanently in Italy in 1963, Smart had to find a suitable place to live. He needed an apartment with room for two studios, one for himself, the other for his Australian companion, the painter Ian Bent. The apartment they settled in was in the Trastevere district of Rome, across the river from Rome’s old medieval area. Smart revelled in the historic aspects of Italy, especially relishing the contrasts between ancient, dense layers of urban dwellings and nature; the contrast of industrial constructions of the modern era, like the radio dishes, against lovingly portrayed architectural vignettes. Here eighteenth-century house facades parade below an intricate industrial scaffolding of a staircase leading up to the mesh of the concave radio receptor. Peter Quartermaine wrote of this painting in 1983:

In Rooftops (1969) the dynamics of the picture are to be defined in terms of contrasts and similarities between the facades of the houses (flat, closed) and the structure of the curved radio dish (circular, latticed) … The form which most strongly echoes the aerial bowl in shape and attitude is the reclining figure of the sunbather on the roof and this similarity is strengthened by the figure’s placing—his body receives the sunlight as the dish receives signals.1

Jeffrey Smart’s apartments always had roof terraces and this is the view of an ideal terrace painted from a terrace. The artist gives a surreal tension to his paintings. This is not a bland document but it has the carefully contrived blandness of Pop Art. The light throws a dramatic shadow. The emptiness, and the boredom of the sunbather oblivious beneath the gigantic radio dish, create a tension because old houses and the sunbather are in light so low it is irrational. The dish looks up, the old house windows look blind.

1 P. Quartermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Sydney, 1983, p. 66.

Jennifer Phipps