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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  23 Nov 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  8
• Lot Description:
  Frank Jeffrey Edson Smart
  (1921-2013)
  Flea Market, Paris 1949-50
  oil on canvas
  45.5 x 60 cm
  signed lower right: JEFF SMART; inscribed verso: JEFF SMART 37, TUFTON ST LONDON, SWI 'MARCHE'
• Provenance:
  Private Collection, London; Shirley Sleigh, aquired from the above
• References:
  Peter Quatermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, South Yarra,1983 p.103 no.176; Smart, Jeffrey Not Quite Straight, William Heinemann Australia,1996 p.209
• Notes:
  Jeffrey Smart painted the early Flea Market, Paris when he was twenty-eight years of age. He was young, a student in Paris and enrolled at two of Europe's most prestigious art schools. It must be remembered that Smart was only eighteen years of age when his artistic talent was first publicly recognised. In 1939, the young artist was invited to participate in Adelaide's first exhibition of Modern Art. The group show, organised by Mary P. Harris (1891-1978), one of his lecturers at the South Australian School of Art, was called The Testament of Beauty exhibition and included the work of much older local artists such as David Dallwitz, Ivor Francis, Jacqueline Hick and Douglas Roberts, amongst others. Five years later, in 1944, Smart held his first solo exhibition at Kozminsky's, the Melbourne institution, at its former location in Little Collins Street. Robert Menzies, later to become Australia's longest serving Prime Minister, opened the exhibition and Clive Turnbull, the art critic for Melbourne's Herald newspaper wrote a very favourable review. Encouraged by such early successes Smart travelled to Paris in 1950 and studied at the prestigious Grande Chaumire school - artists such as Alexander Calder (1888-1976), Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) passed through its doors. He also attended the Académie Montmatre, where for a time he worked under the famous French artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Smart clearly remembers the focused activity of his early time in Paris - the period during which his Flea Market, Paris of 1949/50 was created: 'Despite working every day at Leger's and drawing at nightÊat the Grande Chaumire, I managed to paint several pictures. I even painted about three, which I kept and took back to London. I had nosed out some good areas around the Paris Flea Market and had even managedÊto get wet canvases back in the Metro, which required much more fortitude and contriving than on the Adelaide trams.' (author's italics) The archive records indicate that Smart sold Flea Market, Paris in July 1950 to a private collector in London and it has been rarely seen or exhibited since that time. The most striking aspects of the present Smart painting are its realism and palpable 'Hitchcockian' atmosphere. This becomes all the more interesting when one realizes that, at the time, the world's most illustrated and most popular painting was Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, which was painted in 1948. It was bought by the famous Alfred J. Barr, the Director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and placed in its collection to considerable acclaim. However, despite the compositional similarities and some overlapping effects of atmospheric mood, Smart's Flea Market, Paris is much more freely handled indicating a 'looser' handling than anything like the 'American Mid-West' brittle realism in Wyeth's Christina World. Smart's sky is more densely brooding with its almost Polaroid-like intensity. The painting's three multi-storied buildings loom over a scene set upon the ochre and buff shale soil outskirts of Paris. The Flea-Market tents, the ostensible subjects of the paintings, seem dwarfed by the towering structure and some hint of the almost absurdist dislocation of Smart's later paintings is seen in embryo in this rare early painting. Smart's paintings in an exhibition in his honour after his death (20 June 2013) entitled Jeffrey Smart 1921-2013: Recondita Armonia-Strange Harmonies of Contrast at the University of Sydney Art Gallery (2 November 2013 - 7 March 2014) revealed his paintings as still-shots selected from the flickering images of a filmic imagination. An imagination, as his life-long friend the writer David Malouf amply points out in the catalogue, that is as unique and vivifying as any in Australian art. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Mossgreen would like to thank Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for assistance in cataloguing this work
• Estimate:
  A$80,000 - 120,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.