Jeffrey Smart

Leicester Galleries, London
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1981

Recent paintings by Jeffrey Smart, Leicester Galleries, London, 5-27 June 1970, cat. 15
Paintings for collectors, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 9-21 August 1972, cat. 30 (bears label on reverse)

Christopher Allen, Jeffrey Smart: unpublished paintings 1940-2007, Melbourne: Australian Galleries, 2008, p. 155 (illus.)
Keith Looby, 'The absurd beauty of reality', Hemisphere, vol 16 no. 11, November 1972, pp. 20-21 (illus.)
John McDonald, Jeffrey Smart: paintings of the '70s and '80s, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1990, p. 156 (cat. 23)
Peter Quartermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Melbourne: Gryphon Books, 1983, p. 111 (cat. 547)
Jeffrey Smart, Edmund Capon, Germaine Greer, Jeffrey Smart: drawings and studies 1942-2001, Melbourne: Australian Galleries, 2001, pp. 85, 197

This work has not been lined and has its original stretcher. There is a small cluster of drying cracks below the bathing boxes and on the blue and yellow doors of the bathing boes (upper left). This area appears to have some retouching.
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Ostia was one of the 31 paintings in Jeffrey Smart's landmark 1970 exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London. This show was, in the artist's own words, 'amazingly successful,'¹ with half the works sold before the opening, and only three left unsold at its close. Press response was also very positive, with one London critic declaring that 'the unnerving clarity of Smart's pictures is more than visual, more than a matter of color and of focus. It is intellectual as well.'² 

The 'color and focus', the formal elements, are the core of the artist's practice. And like his various fences, road signs, and hillsides, the staircase provides him with an infinitely flexible yet always apparently logical geometric device. It is not only a means of achieving his favoured high horizon, but it also establishes a steady perspectival stave within which he can dispose his notes of human and/or chromatic interest. It also appears to satisfy a strong innate pleasure in parallel lines, an aesthetic preference which is every bit as strong in Smart's 'naturalism' - in his slatted shutters, corrugated iron fences, rows of seats, road markings and so on - as it is in the abstract stripe paintings of Barnett Newman or Kenneth Noland.

He certainly appears to have been pleased with the composition of Ostia, repeating its general structure a couple of years later in Red arrow II (1973, private collection). In both works a series of parallel laterals occupies the lower two thirds of the composition: steps in Ostia, fence palings in Red arrow. Above the horizon there is a rectilinear structure on the left (respectively the seaside changing rooms and a modernist office building), and a more organic, spherical form on the right (the head of the newspaper reader and the crown of a palm tree). Much later, Smart painted a mirror re-reprise (this time with the head on the left and the rectangle on the right) in The road dividers (1988-1999, private collection).

The artist was evidently also taken by the textural richness of the stone blocks, by the opportunity they offered to create a subtly seductive paint surface. The dominant foreground screen of masonry stairs is a device he used previously in The Steps (1967, University of Sydney) and subsequently in Ball game, Athens (1981, private collection), though with (respectively) a pensive woman and distant footballers in place of Ostia's man with the paper.

The final element in the composition is the faintly visceral (umbilical-intestinal) orange electrical cord which snakes and loops over the steps on the left, a sign of power but with neither source nor device visible. Like the calligraphic coils of The plastic tube (1980, private collection) or The sculptor with work in situ (1984-1985, private collection), this random pasta curl serves simultaneously to camouflage and counterpoint Ostia's rigid geometry, to reinforce and undermine the strict divisions of the composition.

The present work, like all of Smart's paintings, is a complex essay in the harmonics of proportion and perspective. Yet the London reviewer was right to see his work as 'intellectual as well.' There is a weird, dreamlike pittura metafisica surrealism in the blockhouse of the changing sheds. There is sly, closely-observed social realism in the figure of the man reading. And above all, there is the staircase itself, a narrative setting of powerful metaphorical resonance, an archetype of the rise and fall, elation and despair, ascent and decline of all our lives.

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

1.  Jeffrey Smart, Not quite straight: a memoir, Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1996, p. 407
2.  Cited in A.R. McElwain, 'Artist's stature grows', Herald (Melbourne), 13 November 1970, p. 15