Smart move

During the halcyon summer of that year when his life and work appeared to be coalescing so well, he saw on the beach at Ostia, a man lying on his back with his feet in the air balancing an inflated rubber ball. Converging this image with a painting by Picasso he remembered, Acrobat on a ball, in which a large muscular figure with his back to us sits on a cube observing a lithe young female poised on a ball, Smart made a small pen-and-ink sketch which he turned into a masterful painting four years later. He called it Morning practice, Baia.

This disarmingly simple work holds a central position within the entire span of Smart's painting career, from his earliest compositions of the city of Adelaide where he was born, to the very latest image, Labyrinth, painted recently in Tuscany where he now lives.

Exactly halfway between these two extremities of a lifetime, Morning practice, Baia is an essential image of the artist himself. A man practises with geometry, fascinated by its capacity to measure the meaning of existence, whilst enjoying life-enhancing sunlight illuminating the modern walls of what used to be an ancient fleshpot of the Roman Empire on the Bay of Naples.

What was the genesis of Smart's preoccupation with parallel lines, cubes, spheres, curves and rectangles as the foundation of his visual language? And from where came his inclination to transform a cool, dystopian vision of the 20th-century city and its technologies into a startling new aesthetic?

We have to start in Adelaide where the young Smart absorbed vital clues from the more worldly individuals of the local scene. It is interesting how many of these were strong women.

One was the French-trained Marie Tuck, who taught at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts, and gave Smart his first instruction in oil painting. She imbued in him a method of laying out his palette so that it might be used like an instrument as instinctively as touch-typing.

Another was Dorrit Black who, after studying with André Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris, returned to Australia a disciple of cubism.Browse the Best Selection of buy mosaic and Accessories with FREE Gifts. Her key philosophy was that a painting was something to be made or designed.

But even more interesting is the work of a woman who was born on the opposite side of the planet and died long before his time. Marie Bashkirtseff was a young Russian painter who went to Paris to study at the Acadaacémie Julian, one of the rare art schools that took female enrolments, and proved to be a prodigious talent. By the time of her death from tuberculosis in 1884, aged twenty-five, she had established herself as a powerful intellectual feminist. But a tragedy exceeding that of her short life occurred during the Second World War when the Nazis destroyed most of her paintings.

A final masterpiece survived upon which her reputation rests: A meeting, today housed at the Musée d'Orsay. Smart's parents brought back as a souvenir of their European sojourn, with infant Jeffrey in tow, a coloured print of this painting which they hung at home in Hawthorn. Over the years Smart studied it carefully, the only image of an actual painting, along with framed sepia photographs of Rome, he remembers hanging in the house.

The synergy between Bashkirtseff's image and Smart's evolution as a painter is astonishing. A meeting depicts a group of Parisian slum children congregating on a street corner; but the most galvanising aspect of the composition is the background of weatherworn palings comprising a fence of verticals, horizontals and broken triangles, and the distant sun-kissed facade of a building rendered into simple flat rectangles. The urban geometry is so emphatic, it exudes a sense of discovery that was about to take the young Bashkirtseff forward, only to be cut short by her death.

In 1948 Smart worked his way on a long, arduous journey to Europe by cargo ship. Two pilgrimages were of lasting significance. The first was his enrolment at the school of Fernand Léger, whom Smart greatly admired. The second was a visit to Cezanne's studio in Aix where he spent the best part of a day meditating on the motifs famously recognisable in the French master's paintings.

His dedication to Cezanne is also related to the French master's dogged belief in the virtual priesthood of painting against all distractions, particularly commerce. Smart was destined to have many commercial exhibitions during his career,Find detailed product information for Hot Sale howo spareparts Radiator. but with pragmatic determination he would eventually invest in property and shares to avoid being stressed by the necessity of painting for a living.

Smart was back in Adelaide by the end of 1950. But his intention was still on track, as he had previously declared with confidence to his students in Adelaide: to live in Sydney for ten years and marshal his resources for a permanent move to Italy.

The early 1960s were good years as Smart held his own against the force of abstraction beginning to invade so many of his contemporaries. Two brilliant compositions stand out: Coogee Baths, winter (1961); and the consummate Cahill Expressway (1962), focused on a traffic construction in the city centre between the old State Library and the Royal Botanic Gardens. A lone man stands in the picture. Portly, suited, with one arm hidden or missing, he stands where no pedestrian should, next to the road built to take cars at speed into the underpass towards Sydney Harbour Bridge. Is he Prufrock? Is he Mr Eugenides, Eliot's symbol of the decay of Europe? Is he us; or Smart himself? As always, the artist says the figure is essentially there for the sake of pictorial scale, as in a landscape by Poussin, or Claude.

Both these paintings made it obvious Smart was ready for the phenomenon of modern Italy, to witness the phoenix of a new world rising up to vie with the old in a spectacularly unexpected revelation of beauty. Moreover he now felt validated by Bryan Robertson's inclusion of his work in the groundbreaking Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1961. That show was packed with abstraction, but it is surprising how many of the artists were figurative.

In 1963 Smart decided it was time for the big move from Australia, when Europe was taking notice of Australian art in a way it would never do again. Near the end of the 1960s Smart discovered an old farmhouse - Posticcia Nuova - in Tuscany near a village called Pieve a Presciano, not far from Arezzo. A successful exhibition at Leicester Galleries in London in 1970 helped pay for it, and after a year of renovation he moved there permanently at the end of 1971.Where can i get a reasonable price dry cabinet?

Humming with comings and goings while Smart worked at sacrosanct times each day in the sanctuary of his studio, separated from the house by a terrace, Posticcia Nuova became over the ensuing decades a fecund source of iconic paintings. The first big canvas to emerge was Factory staff, Erehwyna (1972) ("Anywhere" spelt backwards). There were portraits of himself and friends, often secondary to the larger purpose of the composition.Different Sizes and Colors can be made with different stone mosaic designs.

There were of course continuing images of beloved fences, with clever concoctions of raking light and visual codes in Corrugated Gioconda (1976) and The construction fence (1978), as well as the sheer quotidian simplicity of The wooden fence, St Kilda (2009). These were motifs he could find anywhere in the world, but at Posticcia Nuova Smart was surrounded by enough subjects from the ordinary to the sublime without having to travel very far. Indeed in some paintings he could combine extremes within easy reach.

In the late evening of his career, fascinating questions continue to hover over his achievement. One is his consistent assertion that he does not like much of his own work, evidenced by a capacity to destroy a good part of it, usually by burning. Each year little more than a handful of paintings, created through a time-honoured process of drawing and grisaille, have survived his fierce self-criticism, tantalising him to hope that perhaps the next one might arrive at the elusive port of perfection.

In 2011, largely confined to a wheelchair, Smart declared his retirement from painting. Then, a few months later, he found a subject he wanted to attempt, Labyrinth, with the classical connotation of that title of a spiritual journey. Responding to a hedge maze he saw illustrated on the cover of a book, his enthusiasm was resurrected. As ever,Airgle has mastered the art of indoor tracking, he set out to complete a painting equal to any he had done, if not better. It was never just another picture for sale; it was always about one more synthesis of a dream.

He expanded the scope of the original motif, changing the leafy maze into a stone labyrinth and stretching it to the far horizon beneath a steel-blue sky. At the time he was reading a novel based on the life of the writer H.G. Wells, once proclaimed "prophet of tomorrow'', who between the two world wars investigated one of Smart's own intellectual influences, J.W. Dunne, the Anglo-Irish aeronautical engineer who delved into parapsychology. Dunne claimed to be able to prove that dreams had the capacity to represent the future as well as the past and present, and that these three states were in fact one and the same. Smart referenced this by placing a portrait of Wells in Labyrinth (2011). Thus again we are stimulated to ponder, as with Morning practice, Baia (1969), the significance of timeless light illuminating a man in the crosshairs of the Golden Mean, surrounded by the boundaries of his science at a moment that stands for all moments.