Jeffrey Smart in “Il Boom” Italy

Jeffrey Smart was smitten by Italy in those tough years after the Second World War. The cult of the Mediterranean had long been a passion for English-speaking artists; and the young Australian was among a drift of creators and idlers who from the late 1940s flocked to the region around the Bay of Naples, from the isles of Ischia and Capri, extending past Sorrento along the Amalfi coast. For them the drowsy south was escape from cares and conventions: from the gloom of austerity Britain, from the pressure of America’s boom economy.

The Neapolitan climate was pleasant, food cheap and exotic, the communities cheerfully welcoming, and the region was brimming with stimulus. Here was a landscape that combined pleasures of sea, sun and peasant villages, with the glories of the classical past, those ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Paestrum, not to mention the picturesque beauty of Vesuvius, of semi-forested islands, and of a craggy coastline. Just the place to escape the rat-race and write, compose, draw, or paint.

If it does not figure highly in cultural history, this was a vital post-war melting pot for the creative arts. Notable mid-career writers gravitated to this southern bohemia, figures like Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden and Graham Greene leased or purchased dwellings on Ischia and Capri, while the ballet dancer Serge Fokine bought a small island off the village of Positano (it passed to Rudolph Nureyev after his death). There was an open gay presence, because foreign homosexuals might live without harassment.

Most of the foreign sojourners were barely known: witty youngsters like the Americans Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith and Gore Vidal, or the promising British artists John Craxton, Keith Vaughan and John Minton who used aspects of this dozy idyll in their pictures. Some of Minton’s work became the illustrations for Elizabeth David’s first book Mediterranean Cooking (1950); and Highsmith used the expatriate milieu for her evocative thriller The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). The author put much in. When the character Tom Ripley first enters the rented peasant cottage, he notices Dickie Greenleaf is using one cramped room as a studio, fumblingly trying his hand at painting. This is in a fishing village an hour’s dusty bus trip from Naples, and we are among those louche young Yankees, mostly with Ivy League backgrounds, who were then poodling about the region. Elizabeth David herself mentioned in letters that rowdy American crowd: “The piazza [at Capri] in the evening is a perfect nightmare of their noise and screaming,” she complained in 1950.[1]

Jeffrey Smart, Michael Shannon and Jacqueline Hick were not well-heeled. But, due to the devaluation of the lira, for £5 per month the Australian trio spent in 1949-50 what Smart always spoke of an idyllic autumn and winter sharing Casa Antica, a pink villa near the village of Testaccio on Ischia.[2] It lacked plumbing. Water was carried in each morning by bare-footed women balancing terracotta vases on their heads. The lights glowed weakly with unreliable local electricity, forcing one to use candles at night. And transportation was either by foot or horse-drawn carrozza on unpaved tracks. But the artists enjoyed every minute, drawing and painting, drinking and talking, soaking up the atmosphere. “The view from the terrace was immense and fantastic,” Smart recalled:

We looked down over the flat roofs and then there was a long beach with cliffs, all deserted. At the end of this beach is a tiny picturesque village called Sant’Angelo, with the peninsula hump island of Sant’Angelo. We were told that a German writer called Thomas Mann had lived there … There were no wirelesses, no loudspeakers, no traffic noises, no mechanical devices. All you heard was the occasional beating of a carpet and the sound of women singing.[3]

After creative toil, the Australians didn’t have to stroll far to find company that was convivial, cultured and progressive. There were affable get-togethers, including drinks at Auden’s house at Forio (Smart called it “pretty grotty, but then Wystan always had a flair for squalor”), and they met a young Australian painter living nearby. His name was Donald Friend, and he soon moved in, cementing what would be a life-long friendship. An invitation was sent to another chum drifting around Europe, Justin O’Brien, although in the meantime the painter Margaret Cilento arrived at their doorstep. Smart also eased into the habit of catching the morning vaporetto across to Naples once a week to shop and spend the afternoon closely studying works in that city’s neglected, yet great museum.[4]

It would be over a decade before Jeffrey Smart returned to Italy. And what he encountered then became the enduring subject for his art. Gone was the rural Mediterranean lifestyle: “The Italian scene, the countryside within which centuries of Italians had lived, was destroyed and disfigured forever,” explains the media commentator, Ernesto della Loggia. “Hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of coast, ancient towns and communes, prestigious historical centres, entire islands, woods, moors, and alpine valleys, disappeared or became unrecognizable.”[5] Because even as Smart had earlier been idling on Ischia, governments were confronting the enormous task of rebuilding shattered countries.

Especially significant across Western Europe would be those industrial reforms prompted by the Marshall Plan. Italy, a predominantly backward agricultural nation, benefited from US$1.5 billion of aid poured into the country between 1948 and 1952. The transformation was momentous. Industrial expansion in the northern region bounded by the manufacturing centres of Turin, Milan and the port at Genoa, triggered massive internal migration.[6] Entire communities in the rural south were uprooted, with nearly 9 million people shifting north by 1970. Boosted by this cheap labour force, and the creation of a European Common Market, Italy experienced unprecedented growth (GDP progressively doubled between 1950 and 1962), giving rise to the phrase boom economico—popularly shortened to il boom—for this period of rising living standards and rapid social change: “Ten years ago at Turin,” the influential Epoca magazine reported in 1960:

the worker Giovanni B arrived at the factory on a bicycle. He was dressed in a leather jacket, a pair of ancient gloves, and had a beret pulled down to his eyes. In recent months, by contrast, from the moment he leaves the house to go to work he is dressed like some office worker in a public concern or city enterprise. He wears a fine wool suit and a tie, and drives a small car …[7]

In the late 1940s housing had been the urgent issue for war-shattered Italy. If functionalist apartment blocks were a common residential solution across Europe, national accents emerged in town planning and urban reconstruction. A government estate rising outside Vienna was visibly dissimilar to another being built at Prague, or Marseilles, Hamburg, Portsmouth. In Italy all became the responsibility of INA-Casa, a housing authority charged with accommodating the disadvantaged and urban poor.[8] Architecturally, its efforts had not been a success. Drab filing-cabinet-like buildings in bare concrete were inflicted upon towns with no regard to aesthetics. Most affected were the outskirts of cities where vast districts of social housing and low-income apartments soon appeared. And, with no urban and infrastructure planning, they became seedbeds for misery, social tension and crime.

Much stemmed from bureaucratic indifference. Many INA-Casa staff were inherited from Mussolini’s urban planning bureau which, in the 1930s, had cleared impoverished sections of Rome intending to shape an imperial-style grand capital.[9] It then rehoused the poor in the so-called borgate, spartan and congested estates on the city’s rural fringe. The most notorious of these depressed neighbourhoods, Val Melaina—nicknamed “Stalingrad” by locals—set the grim mood for Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves.[10]

INA-Casa initially repeated the borgate approach on a broader scale. The designer Ettore Sottsass, who planned several projects, complained that the authority favoured mediocrity: “There was no talk of ‘architecture’. What we were doing was ‘construction’ of low-income housing. What counted was the cost per cubic metre and the number of rooms, and nothing else.”[11] But one leading architect aspired to spark change. In 1951 Gio Ponti elbowed his way into designing a residential quarter on the edge of industrial Milan.

Popular perceptions of modernist architecture—that a residential building comprises stark interiors packed into high-rise concrete boxes—stem from the approach of the self-promoting Parisian architect Le Corbusier. Yet he had a serious rival in Italy: Gio Ponti, who reconfigured design values there after the Second World War. Ponti’s power was due to Domus, a stylish magazine on architecture, interior and furniture design. As editor-in-chief, he encouraged talent and stretched imaginative boundaries. Over the 1950s Domus became the modernist’s bible, applauding the best of international design (in 1952 and 1953 there were even articles on progressive homes in New South Wales by Harry Seidler).

Domus brazenly set to influencing Italy’s construction boom. Each issue pressed modern work by local architects and interior designers. This peaked with the magazine’s promotion of the Harrar-Dessiè estate (1951–55), a shift in direction for INA-Casa, where the sixty-year-old Ponti made his mark with quality-at-a-budget social housing. Domus’s editor won the project with a plan jointly devised with the architects Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini. On a triangular area, they proposed eight five-storey apartment buildings which would surround parkland and a cluster of single family houses. Gio Ponti designed three apartment blocks which left an enduring imprint on Italy’s residential architecture. Not that this was ever going to be in doubt, because Domus ran a lavish colour spread which praised its editor’s project to the hilt.[12]

What strikes the viewer when seeing Ponti’s Harrar-Dessiè buildings is their handsome facades. One apartment block is prevailingly red and deep orange with tasteful white features. A second has alternating walls of yellow-ochre and white, with grey concrete used sparingly to highlight features. And instead of making flat squared-off box-like buildings, Ponti has sections of walls angled to gently fold out and in again. The planar standardised wall is done away with. Most of the low-cost flats have their own balcony, an unheard-of extravagance, and he dispenses with internal corridors in one building by having apartments accessed from exterior cantilevered walkways (a feature adapted from up-market flats[13]).

Building E was the most ambitious of Ponti’s residential blocks. He proposed making patterns on its white-and-pink exterior by alternating the vivid colours of doors, balconies and other features: red, blue, yellow, green, orange. If Building E was not constructed, by the late 1950s other architects were copying aspects of this Domus palette in their projects—and it would later feature in Smart’s paintings of urbanised Italy.

Jeffrey Smart was unsettled upon his return to Italy. Blocks of flats or small factories seemed to be going up everywhere he went. Cars, trucks and motorscooters were pervasive, cluttering streets, filling towns with their insistent noise and exhaust; and, of course, ambling roadways used since the time of the Greeks were being displaced by monotonous autostrada. In villages Smart found the tranquil pattern of life overrun by consumerism. The ubiquitous squawking of transistor radios was bad enough, but worse to his artist’s eye was the visual defilement of medieval walls by US-style advertising: buy these cigarettes, use that laundry powder, drink this cola. Many Italians were themselves deeply troubled. Which is why the entertainer Renato Carosone had a national hit with his mocking song “Tu vuò fa l’ Americano!” (So you wanna be an American!), dropping into Neapolitan slang for the refrain:

 

You wanna join the fad

So you drink whiskey-and-soda

You don’t seem mad.

You dance that rock’n’roll

You play that baseball

But the dough for Camels

Where’s it from?

With his own painting, Smart had now emerged among a post-war generation of Australian artists who challenged calcified convention. Not for them sentimental views of a rural landscape, the stuff of nationalist cliché. These 1950s modernists, who included John Brack, Michael Shannon, Sali Herman and, perhaps, Mary Talbot, took urban Australia as a subject. Smart himself had recalibrated pittura metafisica—the art of Carlo Carra, Mario Sironi and Giorgio de Chirico—adapting the European mysteriousness of this pre-war idiom to local streetscapes. His pictures were composites where elements from different parts of Sydney were assembled into moody urban scenes: “My pictures are completely synthetic,” he later said, “in that I move things around relentlessly, change the heights of buildings, the colours, to get the composition right.”[14] This was art that infused the familiar with a stirring sense of the uncanny. Besides using a cement-and-rust palette of dour greys and browns, a typical Jeffrey Smart image was near-deserted with worn, slightly shabby buildings at the rear, the sky above ominously dark, and vegetation seldom in sight. Lacking traffic and bustle, the scene presents the viewer with unsettling stillness.

Smart was now revisiting Italy, the source of his creative ideas, wanting to recharge his imagination; although he found that what he sought was largely gone. Centuries of local character had been bulldozed—or as Italians themselves said, sventrati (disembowelled), for there was public unease over what were perceived as dysfunctional new neighbourhoods of multi-storeyed eyesores. Sections of the media were asking if civic officials and politicians were dishonestly acting in league with construction companies and their suppliers, propelling a surge in badly conceived and shoddily built flats. And, being Italy, it was broadly (and correctly) suspected that organised crime had muscled in on property development.

Smart was as much baffled as disturbed by this pervasive modern environment. If he sketched and drew steadily, for months he avoided painting the slick trappings of il boom. Then, a potential outlook cohered when he was sharing an apartment with the painters Justin O’Brien and Brian Dunlop. Smart explained:

We were near the periphery of Rome and I started roaming around these outskirts. It was dramatic: you would be surrounded by blocks of ten-storey flats and the next moment be in open fields … A little light industry here and there, strange radio diffusion instruments cropping up in unexpected places. High density living alongside agriculture and light industry with no suburbs.[15]

 The canvas that came out of this was Sunday Afternoon, Lancia of 1965. Set near Via Nomintana in the waste-ground between the city and a borgate, it depicts a middle-aged working-class Italian couple relaxing: he sprawling asleep on the ground, she sitting beside and turned to look at the viewer. The large letters of a sign advertising Lancia cars fill the centre background behind, while the pale blocks of mass housing are in far distance.

That painting led to a run of pictures including The Fleamarket, Rome (1966), The Walker I (1967), End of the Autostrada (1968) and Waiting Woman, Naples Turn-off (1969). With mounting assurance, they depict clustered Italian high-rise buildings—which appear either close behind as a backdrop, or either side of the canvas as framing devices—all of them using the terracotta red, salmon pink and cobalt blue facades of Gio Ponti’s acolytes, as well as the signature cantilevered concrete balconies. Within this artificial environment an everyday figure or two will be seen on foot going about their normal routine on the customary weedy margin separating dense residential estates.

These pictures were hardly celebrations of urban progress. Smart said as much after his solo exhibitions over 1967-68 at London’s Redfern Gallery, then Rome’s Galleria 88, writing in the leading European journal Art International: “I find myself moved by man in this new violent environment. I want to paint this explicitly and beautifully.”[16] Nevertheless, back in Australia, which was caught up in a seemingly unstoppable building boom, many visitors to his shows were perplexed. How could the artist describe his still urban scenes as a violent environment? “Man has made prisons for himself in every city,” he patiently explained to a Sydney critic, “and for the ordinary person escape is impossible.”[17]

When Jeffrey Smart and Michael Shannon sojourned at Ischia in 1949 they were taking a break from studies at Fernand Léger’s atelier in Paris. Besides being one of the pioneers who devised cubism, Léger’s name was synonymous with the modern city. After the First World War this painter captured attention when exhibiting semi-abstract pictures of workshops, offices and buildings abuzz with excited activity. They initially peaked in Léger’s masterpiece, La Ville of 1919, which shows the modern city as a mighty machine.[18] This jazz-age canvas is filled with visual incident: pipes and chimneys, gantries and staircases, signs and hoardings, steam and exhaust, right down to industrious engineer-men with mechanistic bodies. Over the next decade Léger was broadly seen as the artist of the moment, his paintings being composed with motifs from contemporary life, including new homes and efficient factories, machine parts and consumer commodities. This was art which affirmed how modern man lives in a rational geometric environment.[19]

Smart was a closed book on Léger’s teaching; although Shannon later enjoyed speaking of their time in Paris. According to him, Léger had been working up ideas for The Constructors of 1950, his huge late canvas depicting riggers toiling on a steel structure before a limitless sky. “I got the idea travelling to Chevreuse by road every evening,” Léger told a critic.

A factory was under construction in the fields there. I saw the men swaying high up on the steel girders. I saw man like a flea: he seemed lost in his inventions with the sky above him. I wanted to remember that—the contrast between man and his inventions, between the worker and all that metal architecture, that hardness, that ironwork, those bolts and rivets.[20]

Shannon recalled Léger speaking of making pictures that reflected on life. Most of his paintings were sufficient as compositions, but Léger developed intermittent statements that signified the condition of humanity. This was the purpose of The Constructors, where he set progress against a limitless universe. Shannon was stirred by Léger’s talk, and discussed with Smart and other students whether they could craft such pictures themselves.

Might something of that ambition be detected behind certain Jeffrey Smart paintings? He never did paint a metropolis. He also avoids domestic, office and factory interiors, all signature Léger subjects. Likewise office buildings, administrative centres and places of business are absent, as well as commercial districts and shopping strips or malls. In their place Smart preferred European highways, traffic interchanges and bridges, carparks, airport tarmacs, industrial exteriors, and, insistently, high-rise estates.

The most striking quality about this urban vision is that it does not share Léger’s infectious pleasure in the geometric city, that conviction in energising progress. Far from being models of beauty and perfection, Smart shows modern districts as austere, repetitive, anonymous and, especially, unwelcoming. His motionless residential estates seem unoccupied, for traces of steady habitation and warmth are missing. There are no evident signs of wear or ageing, of daily grime or human use. To employ a then current phrase—coined by the American essayist Susan Sontag—this is a landscape of urban alienation, because the world is experienced as dehumanised or dissociated.[21] Every viewer feels it, that desolation and unease, how the lonely figures who linger convey humanity’s isolation in an indifferent and uncaring new society.

If Smart seemingly rejected the values of his Parisian teacher, one painting of 1979-80 stands apart. Autobahn in the Black Forest II, an eloquently designed close-up of traffic barriers, is an affectionate homage to the 1920s geometric abstractions of Fernand Léger. The master would doubtless have been flattered.

Much writing on Jeffrey Smart treats his pictures as whimsical. This doesn’t line up with the person I conversed with. He was well read and spoke fluently on theatre, classical music, literature and European history. His understanding of opera was expert. Smart was a man of culture with deep ideas, and to my eye it provoked certain paintings. The best dig into great themes.

Take his compositions which focused on bridges—a potent metaphor for progress in early modern Europe. This had mirrored the then influential writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the symbol in his book Also Sprach Zarathustra, composing admired sayings like, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

This exalted oratory was employed by the gathered dignitaries in Rome during 1911 when they opened the Ponte del Risorgimento to mark the fiftieth anniversary of unification. The single-span engineering marvel, the country’s first reinforced concrete bridge, was called a fitting monument to national progress and the bold Italian spirit. This civic project reverberated with early twentieth-century political ideals and the promise of a radiant future. Stressing its overt symbolism, the bridge across the Tiber marked the start of Viale Giuseppe Mazzini, a splendid boulevard with a tree-lined plantation up the middle, and dedicated to the political father of modern Italy. There was also a piazza with formal pool on this thoroughfare, where Mussolini later installed marble statues of snarling eagles atop columns carved with emblematic Fascist rods.

Jeffrey Smart painted The Risorgimento Bridge in 1982. His canvas was the culmination of a loose sequence of bridge-focused compositions going back to the late 1960s—nearly all of them contesting the political rhetoric that a bridge leads to an ideal made manifest.

Nothing in this painting can be found when you visit the Ponte del Risorgimento. Smart did sketch the bridge’s parapet with its distinctive geometric pattern, although he didn’t copy from his drawings. Instead the scene is invented. At the fore in Smart’s shadowy image is a municipal waste bin around which lie discarded leaflets. Something is surely up, because those scattered handbills are printed on paper suggesting the washed-out colours of an Italian flag: pale red, white, pastel green. Behind on the left a young woman rugged up in headscarf, thick coat, green dress and high-heeled shoes leans against the dark parapet and looks out at us. Looming up beyond her are the lurid pink structures of a crammed residential estate with stormy skies churning darkly overhead.

The egalitarian aspirations of Mazzini, Garibaldi and their circle have come to this uninviting, monotonous cityscape. Grand predictions for modern Italy are unfulfilled. And instead of a noble monument, we are presented with this cold cheerless view. Tellingly, a lightning bolt strikes the il boom buildings behind.

Film is overlooked by critical discussion of Smart’s work; although the apartment near Via Nomentana he shared with Justin O’Brien and Brian Dunlop in the 1960s was near Val Melaina, featured in Bicycle Thieves. Several other locations from the famous film were in surrounding streets. You couldn’t miss them. To get into Rome, Smart travelled along the same road through semi-countryside as the character Antonio had ridden his bicycle to work—Smart’s sea-change canvas Sunday Afternoon, Lancia was set in that district.

This broad bare zone between city and borgate was planned as a cordon sanitaire. The outlying 1930s estates of Tufello, Val Melaina and Monte Sacro were intended by the Fascist government to isolate volatile poor communities, relocating them from inner-city slums to a badly serviced district with minimal public transport across the Aniene River.[22] Discovering this apparently fuelled Smart’s The Walker I of 1967 where the cheerful pedestrian astray in this scrawny waste off Via Nomentana is Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who gave in to Mussolini and Hitler.[23]

Smart chatted of 1960s films using the new Italian cityscape.[24] High in his estimation was Federico Fellini’s portrait of a bored and amoral leisure class, La Dolce Vita of 1960. The artist praised the simplicity of the film’s introductory sequence which, following a helicopter flying into Rome, moves from ruined classical aqueducts to crammed social housing under construction then to well-appointed luxury apartment blocks. This quick montage conveyed so concisely the physical and social changes occurring in Italy, he explained. In his own wanderings around Rome, Smart drew most of the high-rise developments employed by Fellini, using aspects of them in canvases. The rooftop sunbathers seen near the film’s start are also echoed in On the Roof, Taylor Square of 1962 and Morning Practice, Baia of 1969.

Another work he savoured was Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers of 1960, the drama of a Sicilian family that joins the exodus to industrial Milan. Visconti, a former theatre and opera director, portrayed cultural disintegration against a background of new housing estates, automotive factories and a thriving modern city. Structured using the five acts of Italian grand opera, the film has each of five brothers trying to come to terms with “progress”.[25] Three of them (Vincenzo, Ciro and Luca) adapt, whereas the remaining two (Simone and Rocco) tragically cannot, being dragged down by their values. Smart admired the way the cinematography included moments where each brother is viewed against the urban scene in a manner that conveys his outlook. In this way the film articulated how traumatic economic transformation was for many families, showing that the traditional mores of a rural peasant culture couldn’t be transplanted into a modern society.

Leading Jeffrey Smart’s roll-call were three films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni which metamorphosed cinema. Released the same year as Rocco and His Brothers and La Dolce Vita, Antonioni’s L’Avventura likewise uses the moral vacancy of il boom Italy. It begins with a diplomat distressed that country around the family palazzo has been cleared for blocks of flats. Enter his daughter Anna, who is to spend a few days vacationing with her lover, Sandro, aboard a yacht belonging to Attilo, a property developer. And we learn Sandro has cast aside an architectural career for his over-paid and easy job costing construction projects. Here is the human face to Italy’s “economic miracle”, the vain people who profit through imposed change. In a crucial scene later in the film, Sandro, who has just remarked that buildings are now made to last only twenty or thirty years, spitefully pours ink over the careful drawing of a baroque doorway rendered by an architecture student.

The plot was of lesser interest to Smart, who was rapt with pictorial values. L’Avventura pioneered a mode of stylised cinematography in which narrative events are subordinate to tightly designed screen images. Using scale and architectural setting, Antonioni composed geometrised camerawork where a small figure or two will be placed in an evocatively deserted scene. These moments convey the character’s emotional isolation and disconnectedness from a neighbourly community.

Antonioni’s next film, La Notte of 1961, developed such qualities further—beginning with an opening title sequence showing Milan’s iconic Pirelli Tower (designed by Gio Ponti), and the construction projects visible from this, Italy’s first skyscraper. The film follows over the course of a day Giovanni and Lidia, an upwardly-mobile couple who are leading the fashionable life, although their marriage is crumbling. Throughout, progressive architecture and urban planning are visually made to suggest alienation and a loss of human warmth. Most telling is Lidia’s walk through the city, and her uttered reflections on a rundown neighbourhood being cleared for development. A cluster of Smart’s paintings later evolved out of key moments in the film; including Housing Project No. 84 (1970), Holiday (1971), and At the Window of the Fattoria (1979) which echo the segment where a bored Giovanni stands smoking on the balcony of a monotonous high-rise.

Foremost in Jeffrey Smart’s cinema shortlist was L’Eclisse of 1962, Antonioni’s elliptical image-poem to il boom Rome. With the most minimal plot—a sexual affair coinciding with a stockmarket crisis—the director edited visual rhythms to create a bleak atmosphere. Traders crowd and shout on the noisy floor of Rome’s Borsa; a row of flagpoles wave on a windy night; a sprinkler sprays water across mowed lawn; a bus drives through a residential estate. The film is almost pure camerawork: “A pile of bricks, in the courtyard of the house under construction,” the script tells the cameraman, “The disposition of the bricks makes one think of a big city, with skyscrapers and the houses piled on top of one another.”[26] And for another shot: “Vittoria, who is moving away toward a dark wall, turns around: in her white outfit she is like a luminous stain.”[27]

Smart admired the visual sense in L’Eclisse. He sought out and drew locations used for the film, especially those in the EUR district of southern Rome, Mussolini’s planned model suburb built from the late 1930s.[28] EUR’s futuristic water-tower, broad streets and showcase blocks of flats are used in many of his paintings. Smart was also fortunate to come across Antonioni and his crew near Ferrara as they were shooting The Red Desert on location. He watched from a distance, noting how the director had the camera positioned and the scene arranged to achieve pictorial resonance: “Antonioni edited and composed reality,” Smart told me, “like a painter.”[29]

Smart delighted in misdirection. He was amused by misleading people about pictures. Like his mischievous comment made to a curator about the watershed work Sunday Afternoon, Lancia: “The reclining figure was Ian Bent. I did some studies, especially details of the feet. The woman in the painting is imagined.”[30]

Smart was positively gleeful this was quoted in books without the authors noticing the obvious—that the woman is an updated version of the girl in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, the foundation painting for the modern movement. Smart’s cryptic picture relies on recognising this figure. Manet’s original 1860s work took urban recreation as its subject, and portrayed young comfortable Parisians enjoying an afternoon’s picnic in a forest glade, a new popular leisure activity due to the French railways. People could, and did, enjoy a day trip to the country. Painted a century later, Sunday Afternoon, Lancia is a rejoinder to Manet. Smart presents a 1960s lower-class Italian couple who, far from having access to rural delights, make do with waste ground between residential estates. No Lancia for them.

Many of Smart’s works say things in a code intended for art lovers. He revelled in playing the witty trickster who slipped into pictures visual jokes and sly double-entendres. For example, with Dampier III the costumed figure striking a pose lifted from Watteau’s Pierrot (c.1718) is Pablo Picasso. Beyond the obvious gag—a great modernist turned into performing clown—this 1966 picture introduced what became a recurring theme.

Jeffrey Smart was critical of the mistreatment of talent in a newly philistine society. The 1960s films he admired revolve on creative people who abandon a higher calling. In La Dolce Vita there is the writer turned gossip-columnist; L’Avventura has a former architect who costs garish construction projects; La Notte follows a novelist who now writes for the snob market; not forgetting the pivotal tragedy late in La Dolce Vita when the aesthete Steiner commits suicide (“The most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in a controlled society where all is calculated and perfect,” his last conversation runs). Culture is undervalued, even devalued by il boom—a trend personified in the young stockbroker of L’Eclisse.[31] He knows prices, not values.

Smart would fix on advertising to show the plight of civilisation in a mercenary world. His 1969 painting House at Portuense shows part of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks used in an advertising hoarding, while Corrugated Gioconda of 1975 features the poorly printed poster for a Da Vinci exhibition peeling from a corrugated iron fence. Food for the soul yields to mass marketing. Likewise The Stairs, Florence Station of 1983 has a bill publicising a production of The Little Foxes, starring the actress Anna Proclemer, pasted on a concrete column in a pedestrian underpass. And Matisse at Ashford of 2004 is set at another railway station, this one displaying posters for a Matisse show repeated across adjacent platforms.

Smart’s most pointed jibe against this corruption of values is Four Closed Shops of 1982. It depicts tawdry lockups in an average Italian town where the storekeepers have the names of leading post-war Italian painters: the abstractionist Vedova, the figurative artist Adami, and the Marxist Guttoso. Trendy art is little more than groceries. This message is pressed again with his controversial Art Gallery in Shopping Arcade of 1985, where a sign on the picture shop’s door lists the proprietors as two then prominent contemporary art curators of Sydney.

Arnaldo Pomodoro was among Italy’s leading artists when Smart returned. Toiling in his studio workshop in Milan, a centre for engineering and technological innovation, Pomodoro produced machined bronze spheres and tubular columns sliced open to reveal what resembled the internal structure of engines. This was art that embodied the industrial ethos. Then, at the 1964 Venice Biennale, Pomodoro entered tubular and spherical abstractions that instantly evoked Gemini rockets and the new Telstar communications satellite, an effect heightened by sections of their highly polished casings being seared by intense heat as if they have plunged from orbit. The contrast was extreme between this space-age work and the palazzo where it was exhibited. Pomodoro was awarded the coveted medal for sculpture.

Jeffrey Smart visited Venice that year. The art festival struck him as a mish-mash of fads shored up by pretentious talk. However, as a former pupil of Fernand Léger, that pioneer of machine-influenced art, he took an inquisitive if hard look at Pomodoro’s work. And he was fascinated by the way certain European entries also employed high-tech and aerospace motifs to comment on modern society. Here was a challenge: might Smart likewise use advanced mechanisms to press a point about how the new Italian city aspires to regulate life?

The Listeners of 1965 was his first effort. It shows a man stripped down to his trousers sunbathing on a grassy hill. Grimacing, this figure looks over his shoulder at an inexplicable red antenna array rising in the background. This unsettling device was the outcome of several drawings. Smart toyed with showing a radio telescope dish directed into space, then tried a military radar (NATO monitoring installations were a hot topic in Italy and Greece), adapting its form into a metaphor for electronic surveillance.

Over the following decade Smart sometimes worked intrusive antennae and control stations into canvases, but his imaginative attention was on the format of apartment blocks. We see this in Truck Approaching a City of 1973 and Sunday Morning II of 1975 where distant buildings bring to mind the configuration of massed transistor boards and integrated circuits. The curator Barry Pearce explains: “Smart came to reflect that sections of homogenised architecture first begat in Mussolini’s idea of total control—either seen at a distance or close up in [his] pictures—were in synergy with the emerging technology of computers …”[32] The theme culminated in The Observer II of 1983-84, where cables from a parabolic dish aimed into the gallery appear to be plugged into a dense bank of buildings-cum-microchips behind. Léger’s city-as-machine is superseded by Smart’s city-as-computer.

Jeffrey Smart placed Piero della Francesca above other artists. In later years, when he had settled in a comfortable old Tuscan farmhouse, if you were his guest, a visit to view Piero’s works at nearby Arezzo and Sansepolcro was mandatory. Smart 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 compositions with reverent enthusiasm. Piero wrote three essays on proportion and geometry in pictorial design—The Abacus Treatise, A Short Book on Five Regular Solids, On Perspective for Painting—and Smart would point to where the Renaissance master applied his rules in the respective frescos.

Geometry in Piero’s art is a means, not an end. We clearly see this with his Baptism of Christ (c.1450), now in London’s National Gallery. The life-size composition represents a biblical scene on the River Jordan transferred to rural Tuscany. Beyond the events set down, there is a deeper content conveyed through Piero’s design. It relies on the panel’s distinctive arched shape—a configuration using an upper circle overlapping a lower square. This becomes obvious when you muse on the painting, and notice how Christ’s navel is placed at the square’s centre while the Holy Spirit (a dove), which is descending upon him, is at the pivot for Piero’s compass. Between these points runs a strong central axis on which the painter sets, at equal distances, hands joined in prayer, Christ’s head, and water poured in baptism. This symbolism was clear to a fifteenth-century audience: at that time a square alluded to the terrestrial or bodily realm, and a circle to the spiritual or heavenly. So the painting’s axis shows the devout that connections between earth and heaven are made through baptism, Christ and prayer. Piero conveyed theological truths about flesh and soul with pictorial geometry.

Smart respected Piero’s approach to geometry, but he did not use it. His working methods stemmed instead from Fernand Léger, who at the time Smart and Shannon enrolled in his classes was esteemed as a master of compositional geometry.

Léger had laboured to reconcile abstraction with classical values. Evolving from cubist works which abbreviated volumetric form to cone, cylinder and sphere, by the 1920s his compositions hung on a Euclidean sub-structure. He was soon embraced by the design journal L’Esprit Nouveau, and he formed life-long friendships with those at the forefront of new architecture and design, including Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Amédée Ozenfant. With their own work they aspired to mate cubist form with classical geometry, so the painter’s command of rhythm and balance had instant appeal. Well arranged and harmoniously ordered, his geometric abstractions set modern art on a rational foundation. Besides promoting Léger in their writing (“Mightily he chants the forces of our time”[33]), these taste-makers featured his work in their projects. So the progressive French interior through the 1920s and 1930s had to have a Léger hanging on a prominent wall.[34]

This publicity gave Léger’s geometry immense reach. Which is why in 1924 the Sydney painter Margaret Preston made versions of his paintings from illustrations in L’Esprit Nouveau, teaching herself his system. And again why, much later, in Adelaide art classes, the painter Dorrit Black showed Léger’s work to the teenaged Jeffrey Smart when explaining composition.

Unlike other French artists who took foreign pupils, with his teaching Léger did not impose a style.[35] According to Shannon, Léger sharpened students’ design skills. He explored how to employ in paintings compositional methods, including the “golden section” and “dynamic symmetry”. He pressed them to visit museums to analyse the underpinning proportion, geometry and balance in great art—which is what Shannon and Smart were doing when they took a break from studies with Léger and travelled to Italy.

In his mature work Smart remained a stickler for order. King of the Castle of 2009, for instance, is composed as horizontal bands with the ascending proportional values: four-to-two to one-to-eight. (The bottom layer is a plane of dried grass, above is a line of pipes waiting to be laid, next band is a row of apartment blocks, and uppermost is the cloudy sky.) It doesn’t halt here, because Smart’s paintings function as adroit visual equations where forms have been reasoned out so that not only compositional geometry, but shapes, colours and depicted objects perform as components within a complex unity. The historian Christopher Allen has lucidly written on the design of Smart’s canvases, making diagrams of their geometric order.[36] But much is still evident to the naked eye. Besides plotting a picture using straight lines and arcs, cylindrical things will be contrasted with cuboid or rectangular forms; bright colours will follow a sequence; shifts occur between surfaces, so the eye moves sensually from bitumen, to concrete, grass, metal; and sometimes Smart sets up geometric games with traffic signs. All is balanced, with an inconspicuous row of parked cars being arranged, like musical notes, in a chromatic pattern.

This control tells in Ponte Testaccio of 1969-70, the first of Smart’s Italian bridge paintings. Again, there is a political subtext. This bridge over the Tiber was built to extend the Viale Africa—named for the ministry on it which controlled Italy’s African conquests—a major traffic artery constructed by the Fascist government. The new promenade (it carried electric trams) was the first of Mussolini’s planned residential neighbourhoods in a revitalised Rome, and was quickly lined with art-deco flats.[37]

Smart made a firm semi-diagrammatic drawing on the spot, taking notes of local detail, tone and colour around the bridge. When he set out the painting he reversed the scene to lead the eye smoothly into the composition, and used a landscapist’s technique of reproportioning a very wide view by horizontal compression—so the unwieldy height-to-width ratio of one-to-two becomes a classic two-to-three. Then he altered the two apartment blocks across the bridge into a compact row of five distant standardised buildings with the exterior colours: drab yellow then dark green, rust brown, muted white, dirty red.

There were weeds in Smart’s drawing of a slightly run-down neighbourhood. They are not carried into the canvas, which instead employs tone to convey decline and oppressiveness. A clear sky is made heavily overcast; pale cement paving becomes bituminous grey; a large dark polygonal shadow is set in the picture’s centre. Lay people may not notice the latter dominant geometric shape, although it acts subliminally to instil in viewers an overwhelming gloom.

This is where we see an underpinning meaning to Smart’s geometry. Unlike Piero, who used geometry to reveal metaphysical truths, and Léger, who had geometry act as a metaphor for human progress, Jeffrey Smart employs it here to suggest a spartan urbanised world that “boxes in” people, suggesting how intrusive rules and by-laws hamper communities.

Jeffrey Smart was not a religious painter, although he used churches as more than mere compositional highpoints. Consider Woman of Venice of 1980, one of his few pictures that is mostly foreground with a nondescript building pressing towards us and multi-storey carpark close behind. Much is conveyed by detail: a Campari sign on the roof; a tightly parked row of cars; the moon rising in a streaky sky; a naked woman leaning casually from a window and smoking a cigarette.

There is a narrow gap along the canvas’s left edge, with a distant domed church seen across the watery lagoon in this margin. Art lovers will recognise it as San Giorgio Maggiore, designed by Palladio, the only Renaissance church that has rivalled in architectural imagination and influence St Peter’s in the Vatican. What a contrast it sets against the tawdry foreground world of alcohol, cars, tobacco and sex. Smart uses the view from the Piazza san Marco, although he has the church soiled brown instead of glistening white marble, and it is seen as remote and disconnected.

Smart was habitually evasive about his subject matter, as the critic John McDonald has noted.[38] But the distant church is used for a meaningful purpose. The motif recurs in several earlier canvases, sometimes cropped to a dome.[39] One juts above traffic barriers in Road to EUR of 1966, another likewise appears beyond the parapet in Miss Amhurst’s First Visit to Rome of 1968-69, then one rises behind a gravel quarry in The Slides, Cinecitta of 1969, and the top of St Peter’s Basilica looms over a grassy cordon sanitaire in The Dome of 1977. Most striking is The Hitchhiker of 1972 which shows Santi Pietro e Paolo from Rome’s southern suburbs on Via Ostiense. Built by the Fascist government on a hill overlooking EUR, this ugly if arresting modern church now sits in landscaped gardens, closely surrounded by up-market apartment buildings. However, Smart adjusts reality. He has it marooned in an uninviting waste. All grass is dead, the sky is stormy, residential estates are distant, and the empty roadways which converge on the isolated church have traffic signs which hinder access.

These works surely gesture to a technocratic society’s attitude to religion. Churches were historically a communal and social focus. Their physical position at the hub of a village, town or city mirrored their centrality to its cultural and spiritual life. Church was big in the hearts of men, each church being a point of local pride, of moral authority, of promised salvation. And this affected the course of art: “If you wish to see great art in Europe,” Smart said, “you must visit the churches.”[40] But these paintings show churches as remote and disconnected from the post-war city, with urban planners zoning a new church out of residential estates in The Hitchhiker.

Other canvases are potential variants on this theme. Take Jacob Descending of 1979, which portrays an executive in customary dark suit using an industrial staircase which oddly intrudes into bright skies. This eccentric picture, which transposes external access stairs from a petro-chemical refinery, is usually passed over as a pictorial folly with the biblical allusion to Jacob’s ladder in its title adding a further comic twist. However, might there be a serious point behind the surface pun? Corporate man is going in the wrong direction, spiralling downwards, away from salvation.

There is no mistaking a sober intent in Motor Dump, Pisa of 1971, one of Smart’s finest paintings. It was produced when industrial optimism had soured. For three years Italian manufacturing had been burdened by rising strike action and autoriduzione (production line go-slows), agitation being highest in the automotive giants Fiat and Pirelli.[41] This unrest had become frightening in recent months with the actions of the new Red Brigades against employers, foremen and right-wing trade unionists in Turin and Milan.

The foreground of Smart’s painting is crammed from left edge to right with the colourful husks of cars piled up in an utterly deserted auto-wrecker’s yard. Rising high behind this waste, under bleak cloudy skies, is the elegant tower of Pisa. Much is implicit beyond a contrast between modernity and tradition, ruin and beauty, because that famed building is the freestanding bell tower to Pisa’s cathedral which for centuries has tolled out sacred messages to the community. Instead of a thriving town encircling this trecento campanile, the artist portrays a motor dump—a graveyard to the automobile and the lifestyle it signifies. Here, in these popular Fiats, Autobianchis, Lancias and Alfa Romeos converted to scrap, is a riposte to industrialised Italy.

Smart revisited these ideas in 1992 with a mighty companion piece, The Oil Drums. The size and design of this large ominous canvas are modelled on Motor Dump, Pisa, although instead of wrecked cars Smart now portrays used oil drums discarded before a barrier-like backdrop of mass-produced flats. Turned into the scene in the right foreground, standing before the sprawling mound of discarded rusting drums, is a man in cloth cap and shirt sleeves playing a trumpet. He seems innocuous, a jokey figure of fun. But there’s a rub.

The Oil Drums was Smart’s response to the Gulf War fought in Kuwait the previous year. His unambiguous theme was the modern world’s dependency on oil; and it is tempting to wonder if in this case his signature dark skies might allude to the spreading toxic cloud after the Iraqi army set oil fields ablaze. Whatever, there is no church in this picture. Here is advanced post-church society: although the trumpeting figure performs a vital religious role. In medieval and Renaissance art—those works so beloved by Smart—the hornblower symbolised an apocalyptic angel whose noisy blasts bring on the breaking of the seven seals, and thereby announce the cataclysmic end of the world. There is no violent catastrophe in Smart’s picture. Instead, the trumpet sounds and the drums are empty. Fuel supplies are exhausted. The modern world stops.

Jeffrey Smart was evasive if asked about apocalyptic overtones in his art: “The Bomb? How much more insecure Fra Angelico must have felt riding to Orvieto with the threat of outlaws, robbers and the plague!”[42]

Christopher Heathcote’s most recent book is Inside the Art Market: Australia’s Galleries, A History (Thames & Hudson).