JEFFREY SMART

Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 26-27 April 1999, lot 1
Private collection, Melbourne
Ian Rogers Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2005

John McDonald, Jeffrey Smart, Paintings of the '70s and '80s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p. 157, cat. 67

This work is in good original condition. UV inspection reveals no retouching.
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Reviewing Smart's 1972 Melbourne exhibition, Patrick McCaughey described how in his paintings 'the dilapidated and the trite become the most authentic images in the world - the grid of an empty car park, a factory façade, a housing development.'¹

There is certainly truth of observation in Smart's paintings - his urban dystopias describe the familiar landscape of the late 20th century. Moreover, he deftly captures an aesthetic double register peculiar to Italian cities: a dialectic of classical architecture and modernist design, of weathered stone and brightly coloured plastic, of crowded apartment blocks and empty piazze. It is not surprising that Daniel Thomas should have compared Smart's work from this period to the films of Antonioni;² we might also add a comparison to Fellini's Roma, released in the same year that Monument and car park was painted.

However, the authenticity to which McCaughey refers is as much if not more artistic as socio-geographical. The integrity of these works comes from their careful geometric construction and their associated statements of art historical allegiance. In the present work, for example - the second of two preliminary studies - perspective is densely articulated both in the recession of cobblestones and the angled overlay of parking space outlines. This chequerboard emptiness recalls the 'Ideal City' pavements of the Italian quattrocentro painters, while the obelisk itself echoes Christ's whipping post in The Flagellation by Smart's beloved Piero della Francesca. Even the parallel lines of the foreground grate have an artistic precedent: in the fine vertical corrugations of reeds Smart admired in the temple reliefs at Saqqara in Egypt.

A smaller work titled First Study for a Monument and Carpark (1972) is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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

1. Patrick McCaughey, 'Australian painting in familiar custody', The Age, 15 November 1972, p. 2
2. See Daniel Thomas, 'The Real Live Thing' Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December 1973