Dorrit Black and other Adelaide means and memes behind the enigma of Jeffrey Smart's landscapes
Jeffrey Smart's 10 metres long Container Train in Landscape, dominating the Fairfax Studio foyer at the Arts Centre, Melbourne. Inset: Smart's Adelaide 1946 oil on canvas, Holiday resort, with a solitary figure.
Inset image courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia
The enigma behind Adelaide artist Jeffrey Smart’s work – described as surreal through to hyper realistic – may lie with another Adelaide artist: modernist Dorrit Black.
Black tutored Smart in the golden mean – also called the golden ratio, divine proportion of the mean of Phidias, used by the ancient Greeks in much art and architecture. The golden mean proportion, the ratio of about 1:1.618, is the basis of Smart's paintings. Geometry and precision are like the comedic timing of punch lines in Smart’s eerie precisionist industrial landscapes, “full of private jokes and playful allusions".
Smart painted his first industrial landscapes at Port Adelaide with local maritime artists John Giles in the 1940s.
Jeff Smart – as he was known for the first 30 years of his life from 1921 in Adelaide– was schooled at Pulteney Grammar and Unley High and originally wanted to be an architect. But, after graduating from Adelaide Teachers College and South Australian School of Arts and Crafts (1937-41), he taught art in South Australian public schools.
Having studied in Paris at La Grand Chaumière and the Académie Montmartre in 1948, Smart was vice president of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts in 1951 – around the time he acknowledged his homosexuality and moved to Sydney. His roles in Sydney included art critic for the Daily Telegraph, arts compere – significantly calling himself Phidias – for the ABC children’s radio programme The Argonauts, and drawing teacher for the National Art School.
Smart left Australia for London in 1963, driving to Greece with fellow painter Justin O’Brien. In 1965, he returned to Italy and lived there the rest of his life.
Smart's landscapes mostly featured a solitary figure. One of Smart’s solitary figures, drawfed by a huge corrugated fence, was Clive James. Among Jeffrey Smart’s work is the 10 metres long painting, Container Train in Landscape, dominating the Fairfax Studio foyer at the Arts Centre, Melbourne from the 1980s, is unusual in being set against Australian bushland gum trees. It’s also unusual for not featuring a solitary human figure.
Smart’s last work, Labyrinth, was completed in 2011, when he announced his retirement.
