JEFFREY SMART

A. G. B. Burney, London
Private collection, Melbourne

Recent Australian Painting 1961, Whitechapel Gallery, London, June - July 1961, cat. 100

Bryan Robertson (ed.), Recent Australian Painting, 1961, The Arts Council of Great Britain, London, p. 28

Fine hairline cracks from the plywood are visible in the sky above the park bench and some fine drying cracks appear in the park bench. Small area of paint loss 2mm in diameter to the left agianst the frame. Overall good original condition.UV inspection reveals no evidence of re-touching.
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During his last years in Australia Jeffrey Smart painted a number of pictures - Park at Kensington, Park at Paddington, Beare Park, Newtown Oval, Trumper Park - of empty parks and football stadia. In their near-emptiness, these pictures convey not the pathos and entropy of abandonment, but rather an alert, eager, taut anticipation. This cinematic-psychological tension is methodically constructed through complex and finely-tuned compositional structures.

Smart begins with a not uncommon device, the grassy knoll, a broad, featureless hemisphere against which he sets the architectural-perspectival harmonies and human anecdote which are the central focus of his work. The Park's dark sky, bulging foreground of grass and open and overturned newspaper can also be found in the slightly later Cooper Park I (1962), while the Alfred Hitchcock-Andrew Wyeth device of the forbidding building on the hill reappears in The Apartment House, 1965 (sold at Sotheby's in April 2006). From the grassy knoll, the multiple-point perspectives of building, park bench and basketball goals catch the eye in a net of sightlines, while the not quite straight rubbish bin rhymes neatly and wittily with the tilted umbrella, and the ring of the rim of the birdbath or drinking fountain with the basketball hoops.

Paradoxically, it is by thus ensnaring the eye, by holding it firmly within his careful compositional scaffold, that the artist creates the sensation of unease, of incompleteness. As Gary Catalano has said, 'Smart's paintings are dramas which the viewer experiences as a sort of excluded witness.'¹ In The Park, everything denotes not seeing: the figure has her back to us and is walking away, the basketball court is obscured by the crest of the hill, the street lamp which is the picture's light source is 'off-screen' to the left, the newspaper is illegible and so on. As so often with Smart, we seem to have arrived too late, or too soon, or at the wrong place, to be able to see the full picture.

An important Australian work, painted before Smart finally left to live in Europe in 1965, The Park was one of two paintings by the artist which were included in the famous Recent Australian Painting exhibition held at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1961. The other work was The Stilt Race, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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

1. 'The Art of being a Good Detective', The Age, 10 May 1989, p. 14