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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  23 Nov 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  10
• Lot Description:
  Frank Jeffrey Edson Smart
  (1921-2013)
  Sunday Afternoon, Lancia 1965
  oil on board
  49 x 79.5cm
  signed and dated lower left: JEFFERY SMART 65
• Exhibited:
  South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 19 April 1966, cat. no. 9, (as Sunday Afternoon); Jeffrey Smart Retrospective Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 August - 31 October 1999, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 November 1999 - 6 February 2000, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 10 March - 21 May 2000, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 10 June - 6 August 2000, cat. no. 23, p. 101 (illus.)
• References:
  Peter Quatermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, South Yarra, 1983, p. 52, p. 109, no. 462 ; Leonard Joel, Melbourne, Paintings Auction, 8 November 1989, lot. 112 (as Afternoon), p. 59 (illus.); Edmund Capon, Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, p. 101 (illus.); Edmund Capon, Jeffrey Smart: Drawings and Studies 1942-2001, Australian Art Publishing, Fitzroy, 2001, p.66 (illus.)
• Notes:
  In 1965, the year of the creation of his Sunday Afternoon, Lancia, the Adelaide-born Jeffrey Smart lived near the famous twenty-five kilometres long Via Nomintana in central Rome. It is one of Rome's most ancient roads and dates back to 200AD. It abuts the large Parco Petroselli, which is surrounded by a number of streets named after some of history's most famous philosophers. The ancient cobbled stone road, the park and its surrounding streets, the silhouetted pencil pines and the scattered remnants of ruins lend to the area a distinctly wistful ambience. It was here that Smart's painting Sunday Afternoon, Lancia of 1965 found its inspiration. The area, then as now, is somewhat uncanny - its industrialized surroundings are starkly at odds with what one might expect to see in an Italian landscape. It has a movie-set man-made artificiality. Smart was obviously struck by its unexpected mismatch and its bleak oddity - enough to consign it to memory and then to create the present striking painting. For the forty-four year old Smart the urban scene must have epitomized a certain disquieting mental and physical juxtaposition set within an unexpectedly desolate landscape. His very early painting, Sunday Afternoon, Lancia of 1965, already has the dislocated stillness that is associated with Smart's later paintings. The painting is all the more significant since it was created just two years after the artist travelled to Italy. In this sense the painting may be seen as an early example of the oddly caught disquieting attributes that made his later paintings so unique and famous. His own words of the time not only describe the 'oddities caught in a glance' appeal of the present painting but also hint at the essential visual qualities of his later paintings. Smart's is a scanning vision and he wandered Italy searching for just such insights - ones that might lead to singular and significant paintings. That is, things such as odd placements, facades, strange events, clashing associations and juxtaposed elements. Smart succinctly describes his methods in ways that reveal the creative procedures that lead to the creation of his paintings, including the present work: 'Sometimes I'll drive around for months. Despair: nothing, nothing. Then suddenly I will see something that seizes me: a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows, and I send up a prayer because I now have the germ of a picture. I have to stop and record that inspirational flash immediately, or I might lose it - i.e. make rapid sketches, take photographs, note the time of day in case I want to return. .... To recrystallise a moment of ecstasy: ecstasy or a moment or a feeling about something. Sometimes the feeling is not so much visual. Sometimes it's a feeling about a certain place or area of Rome or Florence. .... There's a feeling there that I like.'1 Jeffrey Smart's oil painting Sunday Afternoon, Lancia of 1965 presents just such urban oddities. What he, no doubt, liked is that the quizzical features of the present painting arise from an unexpected scene of perplexing juxtaposition. Looked at in these ways, Smart's painting may be seen as an aesthetic reflection upon a glimpse of urban life caught in a mental snapshot and expressed in analogical ideas. No other Australian artist can lay claim to such sentiments and such allegorical procedures of pictorial creation. It's all there in early form in Smart's Sunday Afternoon, Lancia of 1965. The painting has Andrew Wyeth-like qualities especially in its high horizon line that places an almost theatrical compositional focus upon the foreground and its behind-the-scene candidness. It is as though the distant city and the Lancia car company sign form a backdrop, behind which lies a treeless and desert-like desolation. The 'backstage peek' nature of this interpretation is bolstered by the prime subjects of the painting, which show seemingly unremarkable elements that owe their out-of-place perplexities to a series of pictorially skilled juxtapositions: male and female; sleep and wakefulness; age and youth; straw hat and umbrella - all of them artfully arranged to accentuate the odd surprise that Smart felt upon coming across such an usual sight in central Rome. Smart's painting Sunday Afternoon, Lancia of 1965 is an artistically revealing and early example of the artist's signature pictorial qualities - its carefully arranged arresting elements clearly point to the visually bracing aesthetic attributes for which he was noted. 1 These points are taken up more fully in John McDonald's scholarly study. See: J. McDonald, Jeffrey Smart: Paintings of the 70s and 80s, Sydney, Craftsman House, 1990, pp.28-29. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Mossgreen would like to thank Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for assistance in cataloguing this work
• Estimate:
  A$180,000 - 220,000
• 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.