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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Nov 2016 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  9
• Lot Description:
  Jeffrey Smart
  (1921-2013)
  Dividing Line, Study I, 1977-78
  oil on canvas on board
  40.5 x 24.5 cm
  signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART; inscribed verso: Dividing Line / Study
• Provenance:
  Andrew Ivanyi Galleries, Melbourne; Private collection, Canberra
• Exhibited:
  Australian Galleries Melbourne, 29 March-11 April 1978, cat no. 23; Andrew Ivanyi Galleries, Melbourne, July, 1979
• References:
  Peter Quatermaine, Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, South Yarra, 1982, p. 117, cat. no. 698; John McDonald, Jeffrey Smart: Paintings of the '70's and '80s, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1990, p. 158, cat. no.160
• Notes:
  RELATED WORK: Dividing Line, oil on canvas, 100 x 46 cm Dividing Line, selected as the cover illustration on the first edition of Jeffrey Smart's memoir 'Not Quite Straight', is among the artist's most striking and best-known compositions. As the 1970s drew to a close, Jeffrey Smart, then in his mid-fifties, repeatedly proved that he was in masterly control of his mature style. Fifteen years had passed since he left, what he later recalled as the 'very isolated and boring' Australia.1 Here was an Australian artist, confident that he could 'make it' in Italy - the traditional land of the Western Renaissance Masters Smart so passionately admired. He even proved that he could continue the early critical and commercial success in Australia from the hedonic comfort and bella vita in Tuscany. There were a number of aspects to the art of Jeffrey Smart that made his images stand out from the load of mediocre photo-realist paintings produced in the twentieth century. Firstly, there is his skilfully fine and highly trained brushwork which barely leaves a bristle trace on the surface it covers. While many Modernists and Expressionists, with their loaded brushes, plastered paint onto canvas creating and building on texture, Smart worked with great care and diligence to achieve the reverse effect. Smart's finish became increasingly polished as he continued to build the glazes of pigment, leaving the surface smoother than when he began the painting. That is not to say that his works are flat or formless - it is precisely through his refined polish that he achieved his resolved volumes and forms. Another defining aspect of Smart's oeuvre is his methodical, academic and traditional approach to picture-making. He would have ascribed to Tintoretto's dictum that one can never do too much drawing. In fact, pencil sketches, formed the base for all his mature paintings. A finished 'large-scale' painting (which rarely ever exceeded a metre in dimension) could take months to bring to fruition from the single initial sketch. This would at times be built upon using coloured pencils or watercolours, before embarking on at least two or three preliminary studies. These small oils served Smart's perfectionist tendencies - he had to get the picture just right. He was famous for destroying many of his works, and infamous for overpainting canvases he had sold years earlier when they were on loan to public collections! A third characteristic of his unique art was his ability to capture a fleeting, if banal, moment, synthesising its aesthetic qualities and revealing its inherent beauty through design, colour and form. In the Epilogue of his memoir, Smart wrote an oft-quoted passage that hinted to the genesis of these creative moments: 'Many of my paintings have their origin in a passing glance. Something I have seen catches my eye, and I cautiously rejoice because it might be the beginning of a painting. Sometimes it is impossible to stop and sketch there because it was seen from a train or from a fast moving car on the autostrada.'2 Indeed, Smart was able to draw on intimate daily snapshots, which were in fact shared collectively, and without exaggeration, on a global scale. It is of little consequence if one lives in a remote village or in the centre of a metropolis - tarmac, since its invention in 1901 has dominated twentieth century urban landscapes. Painted with white and yellow markings and punctuated with coloured geometric signs, they are impossible to escape. Smart certainly could not avoid the ubiquitousness of these symbols. Perhaps, it was a way to deal with it: 'Sometimes I am asked if it doesn't seem incongruous that I am painting autostradas and traffic signs while I am living in the beauty of the countryside'. In fact, he found the countryside 'conductive to work, and that on my frequent forays to Arezzo and Florence, I see a lot of that modern world which I like to paint.'3 Aside from being one of Smart's most recognisable images, the Dividing Line series has all the hallmarks of quintessential Smart: the dominant twisting road etched with yellow lane markers echoing the sinuous road; the V-shaped directors that hug the curb; the emblematic red truck sitting atop the hill like a cherry on a cake; the generic grid-like arrangement of the archetypal modern urban sprawl in the distance; and finally crowned with that brooding Smartian sky. The whole, when deconstructed, is actually an arrangement of varying shades of greys, held together by the three primary colours which distinguish the blue apartments, the red truck and the yellow lines. Although the present work re-hashes Smart's well-known iconography and chromatic juxtapositions, it also points to, and anticipates, other important imagery painted the following year, including Autobahn in the Black Forest II, 1979-80 (private collection, sold $1,020,000, 20 April 2011) and the Guiding Spheres II (Homage to CŽzanne), 1979-80 (private collection, sold $288,500, 23 November 1998). Dividing Line, Study I, was included in Smart's major exhibition at Australian Galleries in 1978. It hung alongside other striking and now celebrated paintings, including The Directors, 1977 (Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth) and The Dome, 1977 (TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville). Of the three studies, the present work is the most closely related to the final painting, both formally and chromatically, suggesting that Smart basically got it right the first go. When Mary Eagle reviewed the 1978 exhibition in which this was shown, she made the poignant remark that 'if you saw only one of Jeffrey Smart's paintings in your life you'd remember it.' This, it could be easily argued, ranks among his most memorable of all images. Kept in a private collection in Canberra since its purchase in 1979, it is with excitement and honour that Mossgreen offers this important classic Smart painting. We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, archivist to the late Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance in cataloguing this work. Petrit Abazi 1 Cited in Edmund Capon (ed.) Jeffrey Smart: retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 51 2 Jeffrey Smart, Not Quite Straight, Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1996, p. 454 3 Ibid., p. 455
• Estimate:
  A$70,000 - 100,000
• 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.