The naked truth? Jeffrey Smart steps up again

Jeffrey Smart’s seamless blend of the mysterious and the everyday has long held market appeal – he’s Australia’s fifth most traded artist – and this year is looking no different. At Leonard Joel last week, Smart’s painting of an uncannily long flight of stairs in the EUR district of Rome, E. U. R. II, 1965/1966, smashed its estimate of $250,000 to $350,000 to sell for $675,000 (including buyer’s costs). The result came hot on the heels of The Footbridge, 1975, from the National Australia Bank collection, which sold for close to a million dollars at Deutscher and Hackett last month, making it the most expensive painting at auction so far this year.