Jeffrey Smart from Adelaide has prelude to fame as art influencer for young audience of ABC's 'Argonauts', TV

Before gaining international attention as an urban surrealist painter, Adelaide's Jeffrey Smart, as Phidias, was a serious art educator and influencer for young listeners and viewers on the ABC's radio programme, The Argonauts, with a later television version from 1956.
Jeffrey Smart image courtesy The Age.

One of Australia’s most famous modern painters, the urban surrealist Jeffrey Smart from South Australia was also one of the nation’s earliest art influencers for children via radio and television.

Adelaide-born and -educated, Smart was an art teacher involved with the Royal South Australian Society of Arts as an artist before moving to Sydney in 1951 after studying in Paris at La Grand Chaumière and Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger.

In Sydney, Smart spent two years as an art critic for the Daily Telegraph (1952–54) and conducted the weekly arts segment, as Phidias, for The Argonauts, a segment of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, then Commission (ABC) national radio children's programme.

As Phidias (all the programme’s presenters and Argonauts Club listener/members took ship names from Greek mythology), Smart told the young listeners (the show had 40,000 by 1953) about artists and wrote back to them in response to the artistic contributions they sent in. Points were given for contributions in writing, music, poetry and art, with the ultimate level being the golden fleece and bar.

A version of The Argonauts radio tradition from the 1940s was transferred to the ABC television’s Children’s Hour from 1956. Smart was credited with speaking the first words on ABC television when the Children’s Hour was introduced in its afternoon slot that year. In the “Phidias and his art gallery” segment of television, Smart assessed the (now seen) artistic contributions from children (now using their real names).

Smart offered honest criticism on how those art works could be improved, discussing subject matter, style, colour and the media used, in a respectful showcase of children’s work from around the country.

A sidelight of Smart’s work in assessing young artist talent was his choice of Kerry Kathleen Fitzpatrick, from the Adelaide suburb of Dover Gardens, for a travelling art scholarship to Japan. This would give her the confidence to became a drama student with NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) and move to Sydney and start her career as television, film and theatre actress Kate Fitzpatrick.