Author(s): Barry Pearce

Australian Art

This book on the work of Jeffrey Smart is the first since his virtual retirement from painting in 2011. It illuminates the vision of the most celebrated of Australian expatriate artists, from his beginnings in Adelaide until his last major composition painted in Italy where he has lived for the last five decades. Adelaide, where Smart was born in 1921, was where his essential evolution as an artist took shape. His early fascination for its grid-like urban landscape was a perfect basis for an ongoing celebration of the phenomena of highways, traffic signs, trucks, transmitters and brutish modular architecture in post-war Europe; aspects of the modern world others found ugly but which he declared beautiful. Jeffrey Smart's vision, which has altered the way we see the technologies of change that impel us through the fabric of time, curiously searches for an elusive stillness that lies at the heart of it, and may be seen in Master of Stillness, and appreciated with a selection of many of his most important masterpieces.