Jeffrey Smart challenged artistic conventions. Not for him sentimental views of a sun beaten rural landscape, the stuff of nationalist cliché. Instead, he looked to the increasingly urbanised world for his subject, portraying aspects of a post-war construction boom he found in travels across Western Europe. ‘I want to paint this explicitly and beautifully,’ he explained at the outset.1 Smart was positively in his element painting the ultra-modern utopia going up all around—the new highways, traffic interchanges, car parks, bridges, airport tarmacs, industrial buildings, and high-rise housing estates.
Study II, Bus Terminus is among several early 1970s compositions he based upon bus depots and railway stations seen in Italy. Besides its considerable strengths as a unified work of art, this superb study illuminates just how the artist crafted his pictures—because it is a full first draft for Bus Terminus of 1973, a major work now in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW. The creative decisions Smart took in designing that work are laid out here, just awaiting an attentive viewer to read them off.
Smart’s canvases are renowned for their strong pictorial design. In this he was indebted to two great artists. Introduced to Fernand Léger’s work as an Adelaide art student, Smart subsequently studied under this cubist pioneer when he visited Paris in 1949. Besides soaking up how Léger portrayed modern cities, workshops and factories, when working in the master’s atelier the young Australian sharpened his design skills. Through pictorial geometry Léger had set modern art on a rational foundation, and in his teaching he introduced students to important compositional methods, including the ‘golden section’, impressing upon them the role in great art of underpinning measure, proportion and balance.
Léger decisively shaped his outlook, although Jeffrey Smart placed the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca above other artists. If you were a guest at Smart’s house in rural Tuscany, a visit to view Piero’s great frescos over at Arezzo and Sansepolcro was mandatory. He would take you to the towns by car, greet the clergy as a friend upon entering each church, then, with a proprietorial air, he discussed the works with reverent enthusiasm. Piero wrote three essays on geometry, and Smart so enjoyed pointing out how the master applied his rules in each fresco. He knew those values by heart.
The legacy of both artists is evident in this picture’s insistent geometry. Smart has arranged Study II, Bus Terminus into three horizontal bands, comprising a large rectangle of sealed roadway, then a row of parked buses positioned above it, and then a thin blue strip of clear sky across the top. That grey bitumen roadway is in turn divided at an angle by a hatched pedestrian crossing which runs up and across at a 30 degree incline from lower right to upper left. As well, the artist uses a traffic sign to run a neat vertical line down one side, the distance of its supporting pole from the right edge matching the width of the upper horizontal band of buses and sky. Lesser talents would struggle to calculate then accurately plot out this design, let alone the complex highway markings curving up it, but the handling here is effortless.
Of course, Jeffrey Smart was known as an inveterate puzzle maker. He liked to use in pictures both serial motifs and tricky visual sequences. We can see this playfulness shaping the row of buses in Study II, Bus Terminus. Take the traffic sign. Running one’s eye along the upper part of the picture, it is apparent that the centre of the circular sign is actually the vanishing point for those orthogonals used to set perspective across the parked buses.
Scrutinising Study II further still, those buses are arranged, like musical notes, in a chromatic pattern: orange, yellow, purple, green, plum, scarlet. Sequentially, this is a chromatic transition from warm to cool then back to warm again. And that bald man looking toward us as he stands, with hands in pockets, before the yellow bus exactly balances the sign over on the right. Even his dark suit and cotton shirt parody the black and white striping patterns around the composition. Nothing delighted Smart more than inserting these sight games into pictures, ready for attentive viewers to spot.
Study II, Bus Terminus also reveals how the artist developed a pictorial idea. When driving with Jeffrey Smart, he would sporadically have the car pull over so he might make a precise drawing or two in his pocket sketchbook of roadside minutiae, an architectural detail, or whatever caught his ever-active eye. Later he carefully went through these visual notes and selected what he needed, then assembled a moody scene from them: ‘My pictures are completely synthetic,’ he told the curator Barry Pearce, ‘in that I move things around relentlessly, change the heights of buildings, the colours, to get the composition right.’2 We can certainly observe how he ‘moves things around’ by comparing Study II with the final canvas Bus Terminus. Smart makes several adjustments to the picture, choosing to reverse the design; to leave out the standing figure at the top; to change road markings and have some curve; to add a row of traffic cones; to change the buses’ colours, and add another vehicle; to change the sky to grey; and to darken lighting overall, thereby giving the now shadowy scene a brooding ambience. So using this preliminary picture we identify the creative decisions Smart made in crafting a major work.
Then again, this fully cohesive work is certainly more than a dress rehearsal. Study II, Bus Terminus offers an alternate, more upbeat version of the transport scene. Gone is that shady loneliness, for a man casually stands here in warm sunlight falling from a clear blue sky. The palette is now bright and breezy, while Smart has set in the visual elements with such pleasing brushwork. His paint application is agreeably looser, and rather tasty. Carefully designed then impeccably executed, Study II, Bus Terminus surely amounts to a minor masterpiece.
1. Jeffrey Smart, w, XII.5 (May 1968). p.47.
2. Quoted in Barry Pearce, Jeffrey Smart: A Retrospective, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 1999, p.178.
Dr Christopher Heathcote
Top Image: Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) Study II for Bus Terminus 1972-73, synthetic polymer paint and oil on canvasboard, signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART, 60 x 50cm. © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart 2024. $140,000-160,000
October 2024