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• Auction House:
  Deutscher and Hackett
• Sale Name:
  100 Highlights from the Cbus Collection of Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  27 Jul 2022 ~ 7pm (AEST)
• Lot #:
  46
• Lot Description:
  Jeffrey Smart
  (1921 - 2013)
  Study for Man With Bouquet, 1981
  oil on canvas on board
  45.0 x 35.0 cm
  signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART
  Related Work/s: "Man with Bouquet", 1982, synthetic polymer paint and oil on canvas, 90.0 x 75.0 cm, private collection; "Man with Bouquet"was also produced into an aquatint (edition 100) in 1983 to accompany the deluxe edition of Quartermaine, P.,"Jeffrey Smart", Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983. In 1997 a further black and white etching of this subject was also produced.  We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.
• Provenance:
  Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney; Private collection; Christie’s, Melbourne, 23 November 1999, lot 14; Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne; The Cbus Collection of Australian Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above on 25 November 1999 
• Exhibited:
  "Jeffrey Smart – Recent Paintings", Redfern Gallery, London, 11 November – 4 December 1982, cat. 24; "Jeffrey Smart", Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 5 – 16 April 1983, cat. 3; "Morning, Noon and Night", Latrobe Regional Gallery, Victoria, 13 July – 13 October 2019; "Jeffrey Smart", National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 11 December 2021 – 15 May 2022 (label attached verso); on long term loan to Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales  
• References:
  Quartermaine, P., "Jeffrey Smart", Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, cat. 783, p. 117; McDonald, J.," Jeffrey Smart / Paintings of the '70s and '80s", Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 243, p. 160; Nainby, B., Stanhope, Z., and Furlonger, K.," The Cbus Collection of Australian Art", in association with Latrobe Regional Gallery, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 17, 128 (illus.), 232 ; Hart, D., and Edwards, R.," Jeffrey Smart", National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, p. 163
• Notes:
  David Malouf, novelist and friend of the artist, remarked that Jeffrey Smart, ‘like so many of the Tuscan and Umbrian painters he admired, [was] an iconographer. His aim was to create a memorable image; one that not only strikes the viewer but also surprises and puzzles’. 1 His paintings amalgamated, in the manner reminiscent of magical realism, a combination of classical geometric composition, visual suspense and uncanny subject matter. In "Study for Man with Bouquet", 1982 a besuited balding gentleman nonchalantly crosses a road at a zebra crossing, with a hand in his pocket he stares blankly into the void. Curiously, in this study, he does not hold the eponymous bouquet in a closed fist, as he does in both the final version of this painting (yellow blooms in pink wrapping) and in coloured aquatints of the same title (pink blooms in yellow wrapping). In the early 1970s, Smart moved into a large farmhouse in Tuscany with a committed life partner Ermes de Zan but continued living a peripatetic life. His paintings from this time began to reflect an underlying concern with the notion of real and metaphorical travel. Often showing empty areas of transit such as bus stops, motorways, and footpaths, they featured raking vantage points, flattened planes, and strong contrasts of light and shade. In "Study for Man with Bouquet", the everyday businessman wanders safely, but beyond the limitless expanse of painted bitumen, there is no indication of location or time of day.  Smart’s archetypal motif of the striped traffic marking is emphatically repeated on various items in this painting: poles, asphalt and kerbsides, drawing the attention not of motorists but of the viewer of this painting, in a clear clockwise direction, as indicated by the turning arrow sign. A strong pool of light from a streetlamp existing beyond the frame, spills on to the figure in a concentrated ring. This is also the focal point where Smart’s competing striations converge. In an interview in 1981 for the periodical "Art and Australia", Jeffrey Smart explained ‘[my paintings are] always about the light, obviously it must be the light. Without the light, you don’t see anything […] by casting shadows and making stapes that never existed before, or the mistiness of making mystery’.2   Although well-dressed in a vertically pin-striped suit, with a tie, pocket square and a pink carnation in his buttonhole, the central figure of this painting is completely anonymous. Attempting to avoid untoward connotations of depicting a single young woman idly waiting on a roadside, Smart began to use older figures, but he soon realised: ‘the perfect solution is to put a middle aged [male] figure […] but as I have become older and stouter, they think it’s me. It’s not meant to be me at all!’3 1. Malouf, D., ‘David Malouf remembers Jeffrey Smart - and Smart-talk from a Tuscan studio’," Australian Financial Review", Sydney, 14 May 2016 ; 2. De Groen, G., ‘Where the light must rule’, "Art and Australia", Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 19, no. 2, Summer 1981, p. 190 ; 3. Smart, J., Capon, E. and Greer, G.," Jeffrey Smart. Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001", Australian Galleries and Australian Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, p. 142  LUCIE REEVES-SMITH 
• Estimate:
  A$120,000 - 180,000
• 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.