Jeffrey Smart | Queer Australian Art

Bio

Jeffrey Smart AO (1921–2013) was born in Adelaide, though spent most of his working life abroad in Italy, leaving Australia for Rome in 1963. Smart passed away at home in Arezzo, Tuscany in 2013. During his long and significant career, Smart established himself as a popular and critically regarded artist in Australia. Despite his success being focused particularly within his country of birth, Smart connected with international styles and approaches, looking to the work of the French painter Paul Cézanne, Italian painter Piero della Francesca and northern Renaissance artist Rogier van der Weyden as points of inspiration. In 1948, Smart travelled to Paris to study under the French cubist Fernand Léger at the Académie Montmartre. Smart was acclaimed especially for his urban and industrial landscapes which sustained a distinctive, highly-finished style that generate an uncanny sense of reality. Within Smart's urban scenes, human figures are frequently divided by the architecture of city space, suggesting a quality of alienation from modern living, perhaps relevant to the artist's sexuality and sense of dislocation from Australian culture. The late artist's paintings are held in major public and private collections in Australia and also overseas including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.