Jeffrey Smart: Unspoken - The University of Sydney

Front cover: The Bicycle Race III 1967 (detail) 

Title page: The Golf Links 1971

JEFFREY SMART 

UNSPOKEN 

CURATED by POWER PROFESSOR MARK LEDbURy 

UNIVERSITy ART GALLERy 

THE UNIVERSITy OF SyDNEy 

1

Coogee Baths – Winter 1962

‘GREAT MAGICIAN WITH YOUR MUTE COMPOSITIONS’ 

JEFFFREY SMART: UNSPOKEN 

POWER PROFESSOR MARK LEDbURy 

JEFFREy SMART HAS bEEN PAINTING FOR SEVEN DECADES. His remarkable oeuvre is as 

compelling as it is perplexing, as playful as it is precise, as murkily complex in its effects and meanings as 

it is preternaturally clear in its geometries and outlines. The University’s rich collection of Smart’s work 

is an extended snapshot, mostly dating from the Sydney moment of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s that 

gave us Cahill Expressway (1962) – the ‘breakthrough moment’ that established Smart as a painterly 

force. The collection extends to the period of the mid–‘70s in Italy, which saw Smart confidently 

constructing that seductively familiar yet fiendishly complicated visual universe that he has continued 

to inhabit to this day. The collection mostly came thanks to the generosity of Alan Renshaw, a lawyer, 

collector and friend of many artists, including Smart, who recalls in correspondence hair-raising rides 

in Renshaw’s antiquated car, the passengers obliged to make hand signals in the absence of indicators. 

Two works in this exhibition come from other sources. The Study for The Traffic Reflector (1974) comes 

from the Sydney Teachers’ College collection. Morning at Savona (1976), an oddly vertiginous view of 

a disconnected balcony and its extending shadow, on which a non-conversation is taking place, is a 

relatively recent addition from the collection of the late Roddy Meagher. 

A locAl mAsterpiece: Coogee Baths – Winter 

Among the ‘Sydney period’ paintings, none is more impressive than Coogee Baths – Winter (1962). 

When Smart painted the ocean baths now known as Wylies baths, they were in a dilapidated state (as 

the drawing and particularly the painted sketch show). The lease for the baths was bought by Desmond 

Selby in 1959 and they were renamed the Sunstrip Pool. The pencil drawing is an interesting record of the 

preliminary observations and ideas about colour and composition that structured Smart’s first thoughts. 

The painting transforms the scene, giving it that spectacular chiaroscuro, product of the brooding sky and 

a low winter morning sun. Smart has often claimed to aim for something of Vermeer’s ‘dark but luminous’ 

quality, and this is already in evidence in Coogee Baths – Winter. but this is not a solemn painting; indeed 

its playfulness is clear in the partial sign ‘sun’, which is a witty substitute for the real thing. The wistful 

high-German Romantic mood is ironised by the would-be rückenfigur dressed in trunks. The sense of 

place is firm, despite the astonishing transformations and idealisations that take us from the dilapidated 

real to this idealised space between sea and land. The rhythms created by the contrasts of geometries 

are manifold and satisfying. The intensely busy graphic lines of the sketch have been smoothed out in 

favour of the focus on light; the boardwalk is miraculously smoothed into perfect regularity, and the 

strong rectangular rhythms contrast deliberately with the forms of the rocks in their undulating beauty. 

Not quite strAight ... iroNy, desire ANd sex iN smArt 

The culture and architecture of bathing are represented here in Coogee Baths – Winter, and also in the 

more perplexing, more strained Sunstrip Baths (1961–62). Set in the same establishment, the brilliance of 

Smart’s rendering of peeling paint layers makes us reflect on the reason for the deliberately pained and 

3

uncommunicative placement of the figures: one 

feels too near, the other too far away. Their lack 

of interaction and strangeness of pose and scale 

are surely deliberate, and suggestive, not only 

of Smart’s formal debts to Piero, Picasso, and a 

Surrealist tradition, but also to a wider and more 

covert theme in his work – the desired male. 

Smart has often insisted on his figures being 

mere compositional ploys, not drivers of meaning. 

However, Sunstrip Baths shows an emphasis on 

the strangely gangling and compressed frontality 

of the male figure. Like Lunch hour (1959) it 

emerges from the moment when Smart had 

taken on the teaching of life drawing at East 

Sydney Technical College (now known as the 

National Art School) in the early 1960s. Smart’s 

role there might account for his foregrounding 

of the male during this period, a period in which 

he evidently rejoiced in the narrative ambiguities 

and incongruities of the male figure. In both 

Sunstrip Baths and Lunch hour the female figure, 

though nude, is a distant background figure. 

In both paintings there is no hint of that erotic 

or voyeuristic relationship we might be led, by 

tradition, to expect between man and woman. 

Instead we are faced with a strange dislocation 

and lack of communication between the two 

figures, expressed in their scale and relative 

position. On the other hand, in both paintings, the 

spectator is invited to engage directly and even 

erotically with the young male figure, unavoidably 

the centre of attention. As a public figure in 

Australia in the late 1950s, radio broadcaster for 

the AbC Argonaut’s Club children’s programme 

and reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, Smart was 

probably in no position to have foregrounded his 

sexuality, even if he had wished. In retrospect 

these paintings and others painted in Sydney 

between the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s are, in 

theme and tone, the product of a powerful gay 

sensibility. The move to Italy in the ‘60s allowed 

Smart a great deal more painterly freedom in 

this regard. The beautiful The Bathing Boxes 

(1968–69), an Italian period work, is more explicitly 

and playfully a study in voyeurism, in which the 

female is entirely absent. In this work we glimpse 

the male body in a hut from a sideways angle. The 

figure’s naked lower-half is blocked from view by 

the prohibiting double ‘X’ of the wooden structure. 

While an intense, vaguely Picasso-derived runner, 

in pristine white shorts, enters earnestly, yet 

4 

The Bathing Boxes 1968-9 

somehow comically, from left. The University’s 

collection of Smart’s work with all its teasing 

ironies and play with sexuality, does provoke 

us to think about desire, and does so in a way 

which might be described as ‘queer’, in both its 

traditional and modern critical senses. However, 

much critical writing on his work, and the artist 

himself, has shied away from such a reading. 

mAkiNg the stANdArd strANge: 

smArt’s visuAl vocAbulAry 

In our age of identity politics as passport to 

artistic notoriety, we must actively resist making 

homosexual desire Smart’s secret key. Indeed, 

what makes his work so compelling, and so 

well-loved, is more distinct, more painterly, 

more elusive, inscribed not in the figure, but in 

compositional values of architecture, pattern, 

colour and light, and in those components of 

Smart’s unique vision of the world that are so 

present in the exhibition. These would include: the 

signboard and the hoarding, the lettering of the 

city; the road sign and road marking; the verge;

the brooding skies; the assertive verticals and the 

grafting of concrete into graceful architectural 

serpentine lines. Such motifs structure a painterly 

world created out of the familiar, but made rich 

and strange. Smart has always claimed that 

great work is likely to emerge from traditions, 

and there is plenty of evidence throughout the 

exhibition of Smart’s engagement with a panoply 

of visual sources – from Renaissance painting, to 

Vermeer and Dutch genre painting, to Cezanne, 

and to the aesthetics of sixties cinema. However, 

the paintings exhibited also provide abundant 

evidence of the singularity of Smart’s world-view 

and particular visual repertoire. 

Road signage is perhaps the most interesting of 

all Smart’s ‘constants’. The standardisation of 

road signage, and the visual logic of the painted 

markings of roads, their purposeful clarity, is a 

product of a specific, post-WWII Euro-American 

consensus, a move towards transparency and 

quick and unambiguous visual communication. 

This was necessitated by the vast increase in car 

traffic and enshrined in the Vienna Convention 

on Road Signs and Signals, 1968. We look around 

the exhibition with its countless road signs and 

markings, and wonder, ‘where are all the cars?’, 

and ‘who is following these directive signals?’ 

In Over the Hill, the Bicycle Race (1973), as in 

other celebrated Smart paintings such as Near 

Ponticino (1973), we are witness to a kind of 

over-attentive foregrounding of road signs, 

markings and paraphernalia which is utterly 

discombobulating. The works are robbed of their 

logic, just as many of Smart’s roads are deprived 

of traffic to obey them. Although Smart has been 

publicly skeptical of abstract tendencies in art, we 

often end up seeing these signs not as function 

but as pure pattern, and visual rhythm. They are 

heaped up, repeated, reflected to the point of 

absurdity, but also of poetic beauty. 

bicycle rAces 

The bicycle also serves in Smart’s work to joyously 

trump the ‘system’ of the road. bicycle races close 

roads to traffic, robbing them of their quotidian 

purpose, staging sporting theatre on the site of 

daily tedium. Smart’s love of the bicycle, as the 

vehicle of freedom, as far back as his boyhood in 

Adelaide, seems to have been extended and 

intensified in those Italian years in the ‘60s. As 

Smart settled in Italy, Gimondi and Anquetil fought 

it out on the Giro d’Italia and the bike was 

enshrined as a cult object, with the cyclists the 

Olympians of the road. In the bicycle paintings, 

however minimally the canvas is covered by the 

bicycle, its symbolic power as interrupter of road 

rhythms, the conqueror of the car culture, remains 

powerfully present. 

The most striking bicycle painting here is The 

Bicycle Race III (1967), a work well known and oft 

analysed, especially since Peter Quartermaine’s 

publication of the photograph on which it was 

based in 1983. Notice the trademark colliding of 

strong horizontals with elegant serpentine curves, 

the rhyming of riders with the architecture of 

the road, the apparently gratuitous spheres in 

sync with the cyclists’ heads, as the arch of the 

backs echo the architecture of the bridge. The 

structures that Smart creates with the three 

cyclists in foreground, middle ground and distance 

are so elegant that we forget that no professional 

cyclist would allow himself to lose time by taking 

this bend so wide. A dominant feature of the 

painting is the quasi-heraldic advertising board 

displaying the logo of the Italian petrol and gas 

company, AGIP. Smart deliberately substituted 

this design classic (created in 1953, by the artist 

and sculptor Luigi broggini) for the the Campari 

hoarding we see in the photograph. Let’s look 

closely at the hoarding: the apparently incidental 

missing piece of the billboard is no mere reality 

effect. Not only does the missing rectangle 

paradoxically emphasise the strong rectangles 

of the upper half of the composition, more 

importantly, it is a symbolic token of a greater 

absence. This logo is known as the ‘six legged 

dog’, but the six legs, its principal attributes, 

are deliberately hidden from view by Smart’s 

manipulations of angles of view. The only six legs 

we can see in this image belong to the cyclists. 

Whether we choose to see this as witty play or 

some kind of nostalgic nod to an idyllic and ideal 

harmony of legs and wheels, it certainly attests 

not only to the intricate complexity of Smart’s 

formal thinking but to his wit and erudition. 

That wit is extended to absurdity in one of the 

oddest, most perplexing and surreal of all Smart’s 

works in this exhibition The Golf Links (1971). 

The painting’s incongruities are plainly obvious: 

the curves of the double bunker, the placement 

5

The Mutes 1963 

of the flag in the bunker and the bottle shaped 

signboard on the course, are all highly unlikely and 

impracticable. The bench and female spectator 

are even more out of place. Odder still, is the 

intricate ‘mosaic’ pattern on the billboard’s 

reverse, with fragments of statuary, modern 

Greek script, primary colours and the large ‘E.S’. 

Given Smart’s penchant for brilliant, allusive play 

with billboards, this painting can be read more 

than anything else as a wry, absurdist meditation 

on his art and its practitioners. 

the Mutes ANd the Art of pAiNtiNg 

When Diderot encountered the work of the great 

genre painter Chardin, after an absence from 

public display, he exclaimed, “Welcome back, great 

magician, with your mute compositions!” One 

might argue that part of Smart’s enduring appeal 

is that same sense of mute magic. In two works 

in this exhibition Smart makes muteness, and 

painting, a theme. It has long been his practice to 

exhibit studies alongside finished paintings. Such 

studies are not purely preparatory but are also 

‘alternative’ to the painting. In The Mutes (1963), 

the study makes the ambiguity of the location a 

key. Somewhere between a warehouse and studio, 

a large board/canvas leans up at right heavily 

graphically marked as if it were the ébauche for an 

abstract painting. Or is it simply randomly marked 

by scuffs? The domestic-scaled door adds to the 

6 

ambiguity. Within this we clearly perceive two 

young men, in close proximity, signing to each 

other. We are witness to intense communication 

but excluded from its precise content. 

Smart makes this the dilemma of our involvement 

with the finished painting, which smoothes out the 

graphic traces. The marks on the large boards/ 

canvases are now much less pronounced, effaced 

even. Contrasts of light and shade dominate; the 

space is somehow more funnel-like, leading us, 

along with the newly-included wooden sticks, to 

the figures. At the same time the composition 

obscures our sense of the space, enclosing 

whatever sense-making we might wish to make 

within the logic of chiaroscuro. The figures are 

remoter, more sculptural, graver. Painting is a 

mute and difficult art, its beauties emerging from 

extraordinary effort and layers of deception, 

its revelations achieved by suppressions and 

effacements. This is what The Mutes speaks of. 

However tricky, The Mutes, painting is one of 

the few which depicts a real intimacy, and indeed 

proximity, in both the University’s collection and in 

Smart’s wider oeuvre. It is one of the few paintings 

to depict two humans in intimate conversation 

rather than bartering, or locked in sinister, tawdry 

or apparently fruitless exchange. There is a 

perceptible tenderness here that is certainly rare 

in a body of work often both humorous and slightly 

wicked in its treatment of human relationships. 

If The Mutes might be seen as a reflection on 

the painter’s art, so too might another work, the 

Study for The Traffic Reflector. Here again, Smart 

expertly synthesises his street vocabulary with the 

precision of a genre painter chronicling reflections, 

mirrors and lettering. This strangely composed 

study is indebted to Van Eyck, Velazquez and 

Vermeer, and yet is modern. It is funny, not only in 

a boulevard way, (the man walking in the opposite 

direction to the senso unico sign is a humorous 

counterpoint) but because it plays with forms, 

colours, and illusion and makes cars reflective 

objects, not vehicles of an oppressive modernity.

The Bicycle Race III 1967 

the virgiliAN verge: smArt As 

pAstorAlist 

Road verges are usually scruffy places, often 

irregularly grown and unkempt. Smart’s verges are 

lushly inviting, often encompassing and softening, 

‘bedding’ the concrete and aluminium of road 

and sign. The lush grasses can also be dominant 

compositional elements, as in The Bicycle Race 

II (1967), in which one third of the canvas is 

taken up with them, swaying and rhyming with 

the movement of the bicycles and countering 

the signage arrows. If we remember how often 

Smart has posed seated, relaxing figures in such 

lush grass we might want to speculate that these 

verges are not simply compositional or colour 

expediencies, but signs of Smart’s smuggling of 

certain poetic landscape allusions into the unlikely 

margins of his urban scenes. These lush verges 

are one element of what might be called an urban 

pastoral. The locus ameonus, the bucolic glade of 

tradition, is now brought into the city limits. We 

might even see this pastoral tradition transposed 

to the rooftop (as in Lunch Hour, where the city’s 

heights become an unlikely idyllic space). It might 

seem counter-intuitive to label Smart a pastoralist, 

but if we enlarge our vision of what pastoral might 

be, we might be prepared to accept that from 

his Virgilian haven in Tuscany, Smart sometimes 

paints the city with a pastoralist’s eye, rather than 

the angst-ridden sensibility of those, like Hopper, 

to whom he is often compared. 

As we see over and again in this exhibition, Smart 

can make the everyday appear strange and 

beautiful, by the concerted act of looking and by 

his repeated and intense engagement with the 

forms of the familiar. This necessarily limited, but 

rich and diverse selection of Smart’s work, will, 

I hope encourage visitors not only to marvel at 

Smart’s extraordinary inventiveness and technical 

skill, but also to look at these familiar images anew 

and to meditate on how the mute art of painting 

works its elusive, deceptive and seductive magic. 

7

Work exhibited 

1 Lunch hour 1959 

oil on canvas 

46 x 76cm 

UA1976.33 

2 Study for The Traffic Reflector 1974 

oil on canvas 

39.6 x 46.0cm 

purchased 1976. Transferred from Sydney 

College of Advanced Education 1990. 

UA1990.271 

3 Coogee Baths study 1961 

gouache and ink on card 

37.5 x 48.8cm 

UA1976.25 

4 Study for Coogee Baths 1961 

black ink on card 

18.2 x 26.5cm 

UA1976.35 

5 Coogee Baths – Winter 1962 

oil on canvas 

91 x 122cm 

UA1975.57 

6 Sunstrip Baths 1962-3 

oil on composition board 

77 x 69cm 

UA1976.43 

7 Sketch for The Mutes 1963 

gouache and pen on paper 

27.6 x 33.8cm 

UA1976.42 

8 The Mutes 1963 

oil on canvas on board 

68.5 x 81.0cm 

UA1976.42 

8 

9 The Bicycle Race II 1967 

oil on canvas 

80 x 70cm 

UA1976.55 

10 The Bicycle Race III 1967 

oil on canvas 

53.5 x 80.5cm 

UA1976.26 

11 The Bathing Boxes 1968-9 

oil on canvas 

91 x 73cm 

UA1976.30 

12 Approach to the EUR 1970 

oil on canvas 

60 x 92.5cm 

UA1976.34 

13 Morning At Savona 1976 

oil on canvas linen 

60 x 49.5cm 

donated by The Hon. Roderick P AO, QC 

through the Australian Government’s 

Cultural Gifts Program 2011 

UA2011.26 

14 The Golf Links 1971 

oil on canvas 

81 x 90cm 

UA1976.27 

15 Over the Hill, The Bicycle Race 1973 

oil on canvas 

100 x 134cm 

UA1976.28 

All works © Jeffrey Smart 

All works University Art Collection 

All works donated through the Alan Richard Renshaw 

bequest 1976, unless otherwise noted

ACKNOWlEdGEMENTS 

I would like to thank all those who have made this exhibition possible at such short notice. First and foremost, Ann Stephen, Senior 

Curator of the University Art Gallery and Collections, for suggesting the possibility and being so supportive of the unlikely idea of a 

recently arrived british scholar of French painting curating a show on a contemporary Australian artist. Her colleagues Luke Parker 

and especially Hannah Kothe have worked so hard on all fronts to make the exhibition happen, and have been scrupulous readers 

and editors. Helen Ledbury was as patient and keen- eyed with the text as she was tolerant of me writing it. Pam bell provided 

wise advice and suggestions, and John Spencer facilitated access to material on Smart in the Schaeffer library with his customary 

intelligence and efficiency. At Sydney University Museums we would like to thank Julie Taylor and Alayne Alvis. Our thanks are also 

due to catalogue designer Peter Thorn, Australian Galleries director Stuart Purves and of most of the artist himself, Jeffrey Smart. 

public programs 

David Malouf: A conversation on Jeffrey Smart 

Friday 7 October 6-7PM 

New Law building 

Dumb and Smarter: Eloquence and irony in Jeffrey Smart 

Mark Ledbury, Power Professor and exhibition curator 

Tuesday 18 October 12-1PM 

University Art Gallery 

Published in conjunction with the exhibition 

Jeffrey Smart: Unspoken 

University Art Gallery 

The University of Sydney 

2 October – 27 November 2011 

Exhibition curator: Mark Ledbury 

Editors: Luke Parker, Hannah Kothe and Ann Stephen 

© University Art Gallery and authors 2011 

This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and 

subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted 

by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher. 

All images are © Jeffery Smart 

Design and print production: Peter Thorn 

Printed using Forestry Stewardship Council approved paper 

Published by University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney 

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry 

Author: Ledbury, Mark. 

Title: Jeffrey Smart : unspoken / Mark Ledbury ; 

editors: Hannah Kothe, Luke Parker, Ann Stephen. 

Edition: 1st ed. 

ISbN: 9781742102528 (pbk.) 

Subjects: Smart, Jeffrey, 1921—Exhibitions. 

Painting—Australia—20th century. 

Other Authors/Contributors: 

Kothe, Hannah. 

Parker, Luke. 

Stephen, Ann. 

University of Sydney. University Art Gallery. 

Dewey Number: 

759.994 

9

JEFFREy SMART: UNSPOKEN

Jeffrey Smart: Unspoken - The University of Sydney

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