Jeffrey Smart Curators' Introduction

HEATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON: Welcome to the National Gallery and thank you for joining us here in the James Fairfax Theatre and online for the Curators' Introduction of the Gallery's latest exhibition: Jeffrey Smart.  We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples of the Canberra regions where the National Gallery stands and all the traditional custodians across the land we now call Australia.  We pay our respects to Elders and leaders, artists and storytellers who have cared for Country and nurtured stories, culture and art for thousands of generations.

I'm Heather Whitely Robertson, the Assistant Director for Learning & Digital at the National Gallery.  Welcome to our audiences here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country and for those of you connecting online through the Gallery's brand new website and our Facebook channel.  As part of the National Gallery's commitment to accessibility, for our blind and low vision audiences, I'll self-describe. I'm a woman in her 40s wearing a long, black dress with long sleeves and I'm also wearing a pair of chocolate brown oval-shaped glasses.  If you are joining the Gallery from our website, this livestream event is captioned and Auslan interpreted and will become available on demand at nga.gov.au.

This year, 2021, marks 100 years since the birth of acclaimed Australian artist Jeffrey Smart, and to celebrate and commemorate this centenary, today the National Gallery opens a major exhibition of his work.  The exhibition curators, Dr Deborah Hart, the Henry Dalrymple Head Curator of Australian Art, and Dr Rebecca Edwards, the Sid and Fiona Myer Curator of Australian Art, are with us to introduce the art and life of Jeffrey Smart and address the complex and subjective nature of his paintings featured in this exhibition.

After their presentation, I'll rejoin Deborah and Rebecca on the stage to answer your questions and you can ask questions at any time using Sli.do.  For those who are watching via the livestream, the Sli.do link is on the event webpage and also in Facebook chat.  Here in the theatre, please ensure that your phone or device is turned to silent and use the Gallery's free WiFi and go to slido.com and enter the event code 418386.  For now, please join me in welcoming Deborah and Rebecca.  (Applause).

DR REBECCA EDWARDS: Thanks very much, everybody.  Good morning, nearly afternoon.  Like Heather, I will also self-describe.  My name is Rebecca Edwards.  I'm the Sid and Fiona Myer Curator of Australian Art here at the National Gallery and this is my lovely colleague and co-curator on this exhibition, Deborah Hart.  I am a woman in my 30s. I have very pale skin, a lot of red, curly hair that is still in need of a post-lockdown haircut and I am wearing all-curatorial black - a big, black baggy dress.  I'll throw to Deborah.

DR DEBORAH HART:  Thank you.  Hello, everybody, and welcome from me.  I'm Deborah Hart, the Henry Dalrymple Head Curator of Australian Art, and I've also really enjoyed working with Rebecca Edwards on this exhibition.  So today we are really going to take you on a journey through Jeffrey Smart's work and I wanted to start by giving you some information on how we curated the show.  There has been a retrospective of Jeffrey Smart's works, so in a way it was quite freeing not to have to include every major work. So even though we do take you on a journey from the very early self-portrait through to his last work, we focused on key groupings of works, on clusters of things, on looking at elements that he had followed in common in terms of the thematics of the show, and within this, we have really brought together a show of public and private collections of a very large range of works and it's something that I hope you're really going to enjoy.

We worked very closely with the spaces of the exhibition, so we start off with the works that were done in Adelaide and then his move to Sydney.  We really wanted to bring to the focus the works that he had done in Rome as well, a group of works that haven't been looked at that closely, and then the move to Tuscany.  So there is a chronology, but within that, we sometimes break the chronology to make really interesting juxtapositions of works that bring out some of the different aspects of the context that Jeffrey was working in.

So if we could move to the next slide.  So we have an image here of Jeffrey working in the landscape and I should mention that we really enjoyed bringing together a group of writers who contributed to the Jeffrey Smart catalogue.  One of those writers was Anne Wallace, who talked about her affinity with Jeffrey as a contemporary realist artist.  Now, she put 'Realist' in inverted commas and we'll come back to the difficulty of pigeonholing artists, which we don't want to do because, of course, there's this sense of the uncanny within Jeffrey's sense of realism.  But Anne said that she really was struck, in thinking of the parallels with Jeffrey's work, of how difficult it is today as it was for him when he was working when abstraction was coming to the fore, for example, in the 1950s, actually working in this way of gathering information. She loved this photograph of him with his little paint box.  You'll see he has a very small canvas on his knees, and literally this wasn't staged.  A car has driven up and is watching what they're doing and there's this element of self-consciousness. But Anne said that there's always this kind of awkwardness when you are out working as an artist, and later in Jeffrey's life, when he drove past some oil drums that he had to go back to to get the information, this crystalline image that he aimed for, he said that when he got there, people were very suspicious about what he was doing, doing drawings of these oil drums.  They thought he must be gathering information for some illicit purposes and he said, "No, I'm doing this to make a beautiful picture" and they said, "Oh, well, we'll see about that" and moved him on.  Anne said she'd had many similar experiences in doing her own work.

So in the exhibition, we've really tried to bring some of the process, some of the aspects, of how Jeffrey worked into play.  Rebecca is now going to tell you a little bit about the different tacks that we took in terms of sharing our writing for the catalogue and also in terms of our discussions about the works in the exhibition.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Thanks, Deborah.  It was actually very interesting for us.  This is a centenary exhibition, as Deborah pointed out.  Jeffrey was born in 1921, and even though COVID had almost foiled us, we've just gotten in in a centenary year with this show, with only a couple of weeks to spare.  So, yes, let's all clap for that.  And thank you to our amazing team for making that possible.  But this was a really interesting process for us.  It's a great opportunity for any curator to be able to look back at an artist's career outside of the context in which the work was made.  We both came at his work in very different ways.  Anyone that's heard Deborah speak before will know she's a really beautiful storyteller and I am, I guess, more interested in the way images are constructed in a formal way.  And bizarrely with Jeffrey, these two ideas come together really beautifully.  He's a really interesting artist in that he says a lot about his work but he also says very little at the same time.  He's almost quite disingenuous and misleading when he speaks about his work.  When asked what a picture was about, he would often say that there was no meaning, there was nothing to explain.  He was said it was purely about the geometry: "I'm only interested in the composition."  But, of course, when you do think about some of his more uncanny, strange, even witty at times images, that's obviously not entirely true.  But for us, this is a really interesting provocation. So in the catalogue, we both actually explored the opposing ideas of abstraction and figuration in his work. I delved into the abstract precedence for everything he was doing and Deborah looked at all of the different references and layers to the world around him, the metaphysical world that he was drawing in.

For us, these two paintings really represent the opposing ends of that spectrum.  You see here 'Self portrait, Procida', which is a painting he produced in 1950-51, after he'd returned form Italy - his first trip to Italy as a young man.  And he was - this was a really important experience for him.  He loved the culture of Italy and the art of Italy and he desired to move back, which he did permanently in 1964.  But it's such an interesting and strange image, this surreal portrait of himself painted, tacked on a canvas, a painting within a painting, this strange figure running away.  It's very de Chirico, an Italian Surrealist-style painting, with the still-life motifs in the front. But alongside you see another portrait surprisingly that we'll look at a bit later which is a portrait of Clive James, a good friend of his, painted in '91 to '92.  You might be forgiven for not being able to locate where Clive actually is in the image but he's that tiny little blue dot at the very front.  But instead what you're looking at is this large yellow fence pressed against the foreground that almost takes on - the effect of it, hard-edge abstraction from the late 1960s or '70s, sort of optical ripples of the fence that look like the modulations of colour and patterns you would see in those paintings.  So for Deborah and I exploring these two threads was a really interesting way to explore his work and bring new focus to works that perhaps hadn't been looked at in that way before and to bring works together that perhaps we could see new relationships developing as they stepped in dialogue with one another.

So that was our, I guess, framework for the exhibition and certainly in the publication, where we're sort of pitted against each other in debate, but what we're actually going to do is walk you through the show itself and hopefully you can all look at it yourselves afterwards with a new take on his work.

DR DEBORAH HART:  Yes, so looking now at a group of works that he did early on in Adelaide, I always like to say that one of the joys of doing these monographic shows is that works that have been separated into different collections over time are able to come together and find their friends, and it's like when they get together, you start to see these relationships and we really try to set up the exhibition so that there were conversations across these works in little clusters and to be very particular about the fact that each work counts in the exhibition.

So on the slide, you see an early work that he did in Adelaide.  He was quite inspired early on by Hans Heysen.  You might not have thought that, knowing his later works, but there's a work in the Art Gallery of South Australia that Heysen did of a railway station that inspired Jeffrey and he said, "Oh, God, Hans Heysen must have got covered in soot and grime, actually going onto location."  And Jeffrey did go to the spots that he painted very often.  Often they're an amalgam of things, so we'll talk through some of these different aspects.  But in the case of Keswick Station, he actually went to the location.  He did drawings.  What you see coming through here that follows through in his later work is this curve - Bec talks about the composition - the strong curve of the railway tracks, that low perspective, looking up.  He's very interested in the city, in the urban world.

During the Depression, his parents moved to the city.  They moved from suburbia into the centre of Adelaide.  And it's funny, Jeffrey always said that his parents couldn't wait to return to suburbia but he wanted to stay in the city forever because it's like he'd found his milieu.  So really from right early on, he was riding his bike around Adelaide.  He was going to the movies.  As a teenager, he was watching British cinema, and I think there is a cinematic aspect that we also see going through his work later on. There's also - underneath this work is 'Kapunda mines', another work which I think brings in a different aspect of Jeffrey's work and that is this kind of dreamlike aspect.  You see an element of Russell Drysdale, I think, in the palette of some of these paintings, but in 'Kapunda mines' it has this very uncanny dimension in the way that he's painted those buildings and that very dark sky.

Jeffrey was a young man just discovering the fact that he was a gay man.  It was very difficult in South Australia at that time.  I think it was very difficult in his own family.  He heard his mother talking on the phone about not being in the company of homosexual people, so it was a really hard time, and I think that you see these little figures.  There's a kind of suppression there of something that he was coming to terms with himself.

Another aspect that we see in the slides on this screen is this very strong aspect of construction but notice how in 'Robe', which is the work on the top of the slide on this side here, we see this surreal aspect again.  So where was Jeffrey getting this from? He was seeing it in magazines.  He was seeing it in the home of friends, the Haywards, who had a very fine collection of contemporary art, and we see him really kind of exploring and playing with shapes as well as a particular location in the South Australian landscape.  And in the one underneath, you're getting this conjunction that Bec's talking about, about the construction, the geometry, the way he situates those forms, but he does place the little figures in it, these isolated figures in the landscape, but they're actually in a geometric construction as well.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  We also wanted to, in looking at his early life, look at those that we worked with close closely and were really important to him.  One really important figure is Jacqueline Hick, a fellow artist. So these two images that you see here are etchings produced in the 1940s by Hick and Smart in Adelaide.  You see here on the left Hick's etching 'Blackout' and Jeffrey's similar print on the side.  It was really important to us to include these figures as part of the exhibition.  As Deborah said, Jeffrey had difficulty coming out, being a young gay man in Adelaide, and Jacqueline from the very early stages was one of his closest friends and confidantes. They met at art school, studied art together and creating art and then went to teacher school together and they both taught at schools, they both exhibited together, and then they travelled together, which became a really significant time for the two of them when he travelled over to Europe in the late 1940s.  He and Jacqueline stayed together in Italy, in Procida, the site that he depicted in that key painting, and where he's looking forward to returning to Italy again.

So his relationship with these female figures was really, really important, and for us that was something that was really important to spell out in the exhibition.  There's a real beautiful quote that he makes about Jacqueline, saying that he went up to her and he made a joke - sorry, she made a joke and he laughed and they went on laughing and crying together for the rest of their lives.  I just think that's a really beautiful way to describe their relationship together.  If we go to the next slide.

Also in terms of this period, it was a really interesting time.  There are so many - people think of Adelaide as quite a conservative artistic climate during this period but there was a lot going on.  Obviously, as Deborah said, he's looking at British surrealism, British modernism, but there's also this pulse of social realism as well and this gritty industrial side to things.  This here is one of the earliest paintings he produced, that's in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, and it's actually the first work that they acquired from him.  They acquired it at a very young, early stage.  So we might actually go to the next slide that carries on that idea.

DR DEBORAH HART:  Yes, thanks, Bec.  I think what's interesting is a work like the 'Water towers' that we were just looking at and the one on the slide called 'The wasteland' that really were making an impression quite early on.  So this was the first work that was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales only a year after it was painted.  But this flows on very well from what Bec was saying about going out into the landscape with Jacqueline Hick to paint.  So we're talking about the one with the water tower.  You see the tower there and the bank building and Alisa Bunbury has written a really scholarly piece in the catalogue about this work.  Of course, the title of 'The wasteland' comes from TS Eliot and many, many artists at that time were influenced by Eliot's great poem 'The waste land' that really came out of the First World War and was now having an impact, because it's such an image-laden poem, on artists who had grown up at the tail end of the Depression and were now in the period of the Second World War.

So this 'Water towers' and then this work 'The wasteland' are directly relating to that industrial landscape, to the abandoned bank building here, to the poetry of Eliot which talks about broken images in the landscape.  It's conjuring something of the atmosphere of that time. Jeffrey actually saw this scene on a previous visit into the Flinders Ranges and he always wanted to go back there and then he went back to Craddock with Jacqueline and they made lots of studies and watercolour sketches and then often the finished work would be done back in the studio.

On the other slide, you see an image called 'Vacant allotments'.  That's also a drawing directly from the imagery of Eliot.  So Eliot's poetry talks about vacant allotments.  You see in this work the image of children at play in this vacant allotment.  You begin to get a sense of where he's going in terms of his interest in architecture and it's really fascinating that he wanted initially to be an architect, so this interest in architecture actually goes through many of his paintings through to the very late works.  You'll see just the little row of the washing, which is another thing that for some reason - it's just about the mundane, the every day.  Jeffrey really wanted us - and I think all his works talk about that beauty in the every day, in the urban landscape that's all around us.

So here we see an image of that same painting that we just had a look at actually on the easel here.  Adelaide was actually a very fascinating place in terms of the art world.  There were many different things going on.  So, as Bec was talking about, there was social realism, there were different forms of modernism, there was Max Harris, who was a writer who was driving some of the content of a magazine called the 'Angry Penguins', but there was also the more traditional aspect of the Royal South Australian Art Society and Jeffrey really liked to straddle the traditional and then the more contemporary because he also participated in the Contemporary Art Society.  Here you see him - actually he's standing in the back row in the centre there...

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Looking out at the camera.

DR DEBORAH HART:  That's right, looking at the camera.  And then he's there with Nora Heysen, who's just second in on the lower level, and Dorritt Black, who's looking at that painting.  And Dorritt was a really important person for Jeffrey and he always acknowledged the women who were important in his life.  Bec's going to take us into why Dorritt Black was important for Jeffrey.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  So what you see here, this is a really interesting pairing of images for me.  The drawing on the right is actually a drawing by Jeffrey Smart, which might seem very surprising to all of you, and the painting on the left is actually by Dorritt Black.  Now, for those of you that aren't familiar with Black, she was a really significant female modern painter in the early 20th century.  She travelled to France, to Paris, in the 1930s and she studied with Andre Lhote, who was a really significant Cubist painter.  She returned to Australia, setting up an art school in Sydney, teaching modern art, but then returned to Adelaide and she gave Jeffrey and his fellow classmates - Jacqueline Hick, for example, as well - informal lessons on what she'd actually learned in Europe.  And this is really significant.  It's kind of the key to where his interest in composition building comes from.  She taught them about the idea of the golden mean and dynamic symmetry, and to Modernists in the early 20th century, the golden mean was a really, really important tool in building a composition.  It's really a mathematical formula that presents a ratio in which a grid can be created and a composition then deployed across it, finding points of focus and asymmetry, making a balanced composition, drawing your eye to key points.

You see a really fantastic example of that here with his later painting 'Taylor Square' that he produced in Sydney.  But you can see how through this grid of the golden mean, your eye is drawn to that nude female figure.  So as much as it is a figurative image, it's very, very highly constructed.  And, as Jeffrey later said, what was so important about Dorritt Black is that she taught him how to make a picture, and that idea of making a picture is really significant.  It's not depictive.  It's not about telling a story; it's about making and constructing a picture.  If we return to the slide before, you see here in the only Cubist work that he ever really produced, the way he's really taken her principles on board.  You can see the way that he's working across the picture plane.  That female nude form has been broken down into separate planes, separate slabs and shapes, that have been fitted into each other.  Although he remained very figurative, the golden mean is actually something that underpins most of his painting throughout his career.  It's quite fun to actually sit down in front of his works and try to identify exactly where it all fits in together.  But this is really significant, this encounter with modernism, because it does encourage him to go overseas and he soon travels to Paris himself and studies in the studio of Fernand Leger, another really important modern painter who was also a practitioner of Cubism earlier in the 20th century.  Leger and his teachers at his school really enforced those same lessons in thinking about the composition and thinking about the space in between figures, not solely as objects or people or scenes but as shapes and forms to be deployed and arranged in an abstract way.  This is something that Jeffrey does carry through throughout his career.

DR DEBORAH HART:  So just before I move on to the slide after this, to mention it's interesting with our different viewpoints.  This 'On the roof, Taylor Square' - I'd like to just mention that at this time and earlier as well, Jeffrey had been interested in a whole range of art history and he'd seen reproductions of Piero della Francesca's work, for example, and he really fell in love with his work early on.  And this work of Taylor Square  perfectly sums up this dichotomy of our debate because Rebecca, as you can see, has really gone into tackling the golden mean, and for me, it's also like this woman on the rooftop who's in this dreamlike state and it's very interesting how this environment of the rooftops kind of also comes through in later works.

So this is done slightly after he comes back from Italy, as is this work, which he did really pretty soon after he came back from his first trip.  So he goes to art school in Adelaide and then he makes his first trip to Europe and then really falls in love with Italy, and it's between 1948 and 1950.  He really absorbs so much about the Italian environment, about the colours, about the landscape and the art, and I think when he comes back to Adelaide, he goes out again into the landscape, into Wallaroo, where this particular work, the image, came from.  I think you see that meeting place between Adelaide and Italy somehow in this work, in the palette that he uses.  For me, this is again a very tightly constructed work: the doubling of the figures, the doubling of the poles, the way those oil drums lead your eye back into the landscape.  And Jeffrey went into the place and he made many drawings and studies.  We're very lucky that our Gallery was able to acquire these watercolour sketches.  I think they were very important in terms of actually getting the structure of the work.  Then he went back into the studio and did the finished work that you saw on the screen.

So 'Wallaroo' was a work that won the Jubilee Art Prize in 1951.  It came at a time when Jeffrey was struggling to find his way.  He was thinking about what his sense of direction would be, and winning the prize was a boost of confidence.

So we see in Sydney that he's really experimenting, and Bec is going to talk about some of the unusual things that started to appear at a time when he was not working full-time as an artist.  So he was working on television.  He was an art critic.  He was a teacher.  And people forget that Jeffrey actually started off really trying to eke out a living from his art.  He only became successful quite a bit later on.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  These works produced in Sydney are really interesting.  I think you can see particularly following on from the paintings in Adelaide, the colour brightens and they open up.  You feel that the freedom of living in Sydney where he is more anonymous but he's also able to be himself more, he's able to actually move in a community that is more sympathetic with his own values and his own interests.  He's able to experiment more.  So these works are so much more experimental and quite surreal I think as well.  What we found quite interesting with Jeffrey's work is he's not a Surrealist per se, in that his images are entirely dreamlike.  What he does is he gets these objects from the everyday world, these mundane objects and scenes, but he places them together in very uncanny combinations.

This image at the top, 'Strange street', is one of my absolute favourite paintings in the exhibition.  It's very small but it's impossible to walk by.  It's this strange piazza with statues scattered throughout and this strange figure kicking its way off the plinth, these very odd moments that he introduces that aren't really that unusual really but the way he brings them together, they suddenly take on a new sense of the uncanny. But, as Deborah said, this was a really - it was quite a difficult time in many ways.  As a realist painter, Jeffrey was really feeling that he was coming up against Abstract Expressionist painters of that period.  It was a time when that was becoming incredibly popular, certainly in Sydney.  Many of his friends were really encouraging him to loosen up his style and technique, and so for him it was quite a struggle to remain true to his vision within this world where figuration and realism and the precision in which he chose to paint was something that wasn't admired.  It was derided.  He was working as a teacher.  He was an art teacher at school.  He was working as Phidias on television.  But he was also producing a lot of mural paintings as well, which is a very interesting aspect to his career that's relatively unknown.  But during the 1950s, he produced about nine mural schemes, which is quite impressive when you think of how big they are and how much energy and effort and work goes into them.  Very sadly, very few of them exist anymore, which is one of the reasons why that aspect of his practice is so unknown.  But, again, that is another way in which Jeffrey was able to play with compositional design because, of course, if you think about mural paintings, they're intended to decorate a space, and so they really do have to correspond with the setting for which they're produced.  So this is another way in which Jeffrey was thinking about composition and design as well as thinking about the figurative in his work. If we go to the next, you'll possibly recognise this work.

DR DEBORAH HART:  And maybe if you don't mind me just quickly hopping in, although I am very conscious of time, the other one that shows the street crossing is really important for what was to come later - the street crossing, the arrow, the way that he found ordinary life in the streets around him important.  But he brings it together with this uncanny image of these figures on stilts, which came from a photograph he saw of Ethiopian boys walking on stilts.  So he wanted to kind of fuse these images to bring them alive.

But, as Bec says, the next image will be very familiar to you.  So this is, of course, 'Cahill Expressway', kindly loaned to us by the National Gallery of Victoria.  It's one of his most memorable and, of course, well-known images.  What's interesting about this is that Jeffrey really changed his tune in terms of how he talked about this over the years because in one interview, he actually let on something that he completely refuted later.  So, in later years, he used to say the only reason he painted this one-armed man in this kind of - in the 'Cahill Expressway' was because it was a convenient rectangular shape for the composition.  But I think what had happened is that he really found people kept layering things on, that it was about this lonely figure, but actually earlier on, he did say: "He is you.  He is me.  Long past the threshold of life, he still feels he's not quite there.  My poor old boy finds himself in a nightmare situation of responsibility and failure at the same time."  So I think there's something in this almost like Hitchcock kind of figure at the entry to the Cahill Expressway that is so evocative and this really brings to the fore an incredibly aspect of Jeffrey's work that we're going to have a look at when he gets to Italy, and that is this idea of a theatre set.  So he sets the stage.  He does not want to tell us a story.  He wants people to bring their own stories to them and, interestingly, in relation to this work, many years ago, Helen Daniel commissioned a series - I think there were 29 essays by authors like David Malouf and Elizabeth Jolley actually responding to this painting.  So you get all these different responses.  I think that's part of what makes Jeffrey's work special, that it does set the stage and it allows the audience to bring their own responses to it.  Many authors and poets have found his works inspiring.

I think it relates too to these later works, which Bec's going to take you into, and this is really about the theatre of Rome.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  That is really a perfect segue to these works because we have been thinking about these works as being very theatrical.  Perhaps if we even go to the next slide as well, Deborah, to show this idea of the theatre being a metaphor in Jeffrey's work.  You have stage sets and you have actors and you have props.  In his work, we have all of those elements but there's no script and so we're almost invited to invent the story ourselves.  And you do see - this is a perfect example - these recurring figures appearing in his work: this nonna character in the black dress, very proudly presiding over the chairs in the flea market, and again sitting in chairs in Piraeus.

But these works were produced after Jeffrey's move to Rome in 1964 when he'd really realised his dream to move to Italy and, importantly, he remained there for the rest of his life, in Italy.  He obviously visited Australia regularly and sent works to Australia.  He travelled widely.  But it remained his base until his death.

This kind of really opens up a period in his life when he's really able to distill his vision and really get into what he's been thinking about for many years and pushing up against in Sydney.  So you see him really pushing into his realist technique.  But you see this opening up of the colour, you see the terracottas of Italy and the rich skies and the verdant landscapes.  But you also see he's clearly fascinated with this idea of the old and the new, the ancient Roman monuments alongside new technologies, alongside new infrastructure.  This is a period after the war when huge autostrade are being built across the country, when these very modular apartment blocks we do see appearing more and more, and these weird, strange patterns in his work, you see them appearing more and more.  This combination of old and new is something that's really interesting to Jeffrey.

DR DEBORAH HART:  Yes.  So just really picking up on what Bec was saying there about the apartment blocks and this infrastructure of old and new is so fascinating.  You do have to think about the context in which these works are being made.  It's like postwar Italy.  There is this sense of a big period of change.  Jeffrey was incredibly well-read.  He was always interested in all sorts of literature.  He loved science fiction.  He read George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and this idea of radars and satellites starting to come into his work also relates to the Cold War and countries starting to spy on each other and the idea that technologies could start to track people's lives, something that was really like science fiction then and, of course, seems very pertinent to us today and not something novel at all.  So he was kind of foretelling the future in a way.

What you're seeing on the screen here is an image of a male figure and he's lying on the grass and you see how the grass is so minutely painted.  You can just imagine that kind of meditative process of actually applying the paint.  You can hear the rustle of the grasses.  And this figure is listening back, but this radar is also listening, and it's like this figure is located on the curve of the earth.  And it's a very poignant image.  You know, Jeffrey really wanted to distill his images.  I think that's something very important.  It's like a haiku in poetry.

The other figure, which Bec and I really loved, is one of the 'View of Rome', with the woman who surely has binoculars looking out at the buildings, and again this idea of new technologies and the beautiful palette in this work of the old buildings of Rome.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Again, this idea then of watching and being watched and surveillance that comes up in those radar dishes is seen in this work.  This is I guess one of the themes - the key themes of our second room in the exhibition, the observer watching, being watched, surveillance.  Jeffrey was also really interested in perspective, so we have brought together a group of works, this work included, that look at that idea of surveillance and somebody listening and watching your every move.  I hope as well - we've just inserted these preliminary drawings as well.  This is the 'Control tower' from the Art Gallery of South Australia, but these preliminary drawings as well which are very cinematic, I think. You can see that there is always that interest in cinema in  his work. It's almost like a storyboard of a plot.  You've got these tiny figures being dwarfed by this large control tower that's watching everything.  And if we go to the next image as well, this idea of always having to look up or look down.  You'll notice Jeffrey is always playing with our vantage point as the viewer, playing with our expectations of what we expect to see and what we expect to be able to look at.  There's these people very far away looking at you from afar or you're looking back at them, this idea of observation and the observer and being watched.  But also these very strange images.  Perhaps, Deborah, if you want to talk about 'Jacob descending'.

DR DEBORAH HART:  I think this also brings the poetic element in.  So there is this diversity between these things that look very real and that he's bringing then sometimes works that are from images that he's seen quite separately, and in images like this, it's very much about the poetic and we see this image of Jacob descending that spiral staircase, which is almost like a strand of DNA, and I love the structure of the staircase, this interest in construction, but also that it's a very dreamlike image.  And I think he would have seen the image of Jacob descending the staircase that's by William Blake in the British Museum and it's very evocative.  And this is a call-out to poets and writers out there.  I think these two images really lend themselves to many interpretations and I was thrilled that this image was chosen by one of the journalists who has written recently about the show, the one of the two figures up on the balcony, because I think it's kind of almost like that COVID moment of figures on the balcony.  And if you look carefully at it, the way he's painted the rust on the pipes and the little geraniums, the closeness of attention to detail, and this high vantage point and in both of them, this very low horizon line of the ocean.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Again, this is reinforced in this image 'Near Knossos' from the University of South Australia collection. Such a strange composition that you'll see reoccur where you have a large plane pushed into the foreground - in this case, a bus.  What a strange image to push into the viewer's eyeline, but so incredibly detailed in the way it's depicted.  If you look at those windows, you can see through to the vehicle behind.  Such skill in the way he's actually been able to depict these objects.  But again that sort of strange figure staring back at us from the balcony, this kind of open air balcony, while we look back at them.  So Jeffrey is always playing with this idea of watching and being watched and observation.  It's something that we have - we've had quite a lot of fun playing with it in the show and I hope you'll see that when you're in there.  There's a group of images that play with those very sharp, unusual perspectives that are quite unexpected and quite inventive.

If we move into the next room, we wanted to bring together works that he produced when he'd moved to Tuscany, and he moved there permanently to a villa that he renovated in 1971.

DR DEBORAH HART:  Yes.  So when he moved to Tuscany, there were quite a few Australian expats who were living in proximity to the house that he acquired.  It was an old Tuscan farmhouse.  It sounds all very romantic but I think the plumbing wasn't working very well.  It had very little electricity.  But gradually he got those things sorted.  And it did become a place that many people remember in terms of the lunches, the generosity, the lively conversations.  And here we have the portrait of David Malouf, who he said - David said that he'd just finished writing his novella 'An Imaginary Life', a very beautiful poetic book that Jeffrey greatly admired, and David went to the studio and Jeffrey did fine drawings of him but certainly David didn't expect to turn out like this.  He said he certainly never wore a boiler suit or shoes like that and it was great surprise to see himself holding a pipe, which when he asked Jeffrey what the heck was that about, he said it was like drawing inspiration from the depths of the earth, which he took as a bit of a joke.  But actually it's quite a poignant image of a poet and if you look at the little dots going out above his head to a video, the character of Ovid was part of 'An Imaginary Life', the story.  He's really located David in his own environment, with these multi-coloured vehicles in the background.

And on the other slide, we see a portrait of Germaine Greer, looking rather demure, rather surprisingly demure, but you see that her face is very beautifully painted, almost like a Quattrocento painting.  But perhaps the R on the wall, the idea of graffiti, gives us a bit of an insight into that other aspect of her personality, being quite outspoken.

Then there's a portrait here of his partner, Ermes De Zan.  They got together in the 1970s and lived together for four decades.  Jeffrey said when he met Ermes, it was really the starting point of the happiest time of his life.  I do think this is one of the most, if not the most, sensitive portrait that Jeffrey ever painted, perhaps with the exception of his own quite insightful self-portraits.  But, again, he's putting Ermes in his own constructed world.  There's a little two-up game going on there, which is almost suggesting the idea of chance.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  You see here the portrait we looked at at the beginning, the kind of misleading portrait, I suppose, of Clive James.  This sort of leads onto the next section in the final room of the show, this idea of abstracting from the real.  What is interesting about Jeffrey is, although he's a figurative painter, when you think about the span of his life - he was born in 1921 and lived throughout the 20th century - he witnessed massive changes in art practice from realism through to pure abstraction.  And what's interesting, although he did remain obviously very figurative, very representational, is you can see in many of his works that he does gesture to the aesthetic principles of those movements.  So see here, we have the painting - it's called the 'Corrugated Gioconda'.  So I think perhaps the joke is quite obvious. There's this poster of the 'Mona Lisa' on the fence, or the 'Gioconda', as she's known. And you know what's so interesting about Jeffrey is he was really interested in art of the past but he was interested in what was happening around him at the same time.

So perhaps if we go to the next slide as well, Deborah, you can see the way he's using corrugation, this fence motif, in a very abstract way, almost as though it is an abstract painting.  This particular work is referencing contemporary Italian painters of the period, all of whom really work in a much more expressive manner than Jeffrey.  So he's not particularly a fan of their work.  So it is a bit of a jibe.  But what's so interesting in his paintings of those shop doors is he is referencing the tropes of hard-edge abstraction - the sharp, flat colour; the bright, poppy colours; and the shapes.

If we move to the next, again this is him looking at Leger.  So this is called 'The painted factory, Tuscany'. We just include as well Leger's painting in our collection on display just downstairs because this is homage to his former teacher. He's actually painted a mural by Leger on the side of his factory.  And if you look closely, you'll see the figure in the doorway is holding a painting of that painting and within that painting is a painting of that painting. So there's also a slight reference to Surrealism as well.

But if we move ahead, and perhaps we'll go to the next one as well, this is really best realised - you know, his interest in abstraction and hard edge and colour field is represented here.  His imagery of the road - if you think about the road itself, it's the perfect subject to be reduced down into an abstract visual language, the flat nature of the asphalt, the markings of the road, the street signs, these big, blocky shapes created by trucks.  And he did say of this particular painting in the bottom corner 'Truck approaching' that he'd wanted to divide the composition into two, and so he's done that by using the corner of the truck.  So the truck itself has become this very structural motif within the composition.  You see as well this sort of round, circular motif in 'Night stop, Bombay', that it's a flat, circular shape.  It's not so much telling us something.  There's not really a narrative.  He's playing with colour and form in a very confident way.

Then again you see the road, the flatness of the road.  There's no texture there.  It's a flat plane of colour, and these dizzying road markings and signs at the side of the road in 'Autobahn in the Black Forest', and looking at that closely, the detail in those angled lines, is quite magnificent.  But you can see he's playing with form and colour and shape and really finding that in the world around him, abstracting from the world around him.

DR DEBORAH HART:  And I think you really see as you go into that last room, we try to give this big wall of these bold shapes.  You see the shift in colour.  If you think back to those early works we were looking at of Adelaide, that move from the tonal palette through to these much brighter works, it's very, very striking.  And we also have this combination of the organic, the shape of the plastic tube, which actually came from a very mundane thing.  So it was Jeffrey - the pipes at the back of the house were calcified and they actually went to the equivalent of Bunnings near where they were living in Tuscany and they got to the place and these guys started unrolling the plastic tube and Jeffrey said, "Oh, my God, that is just the most beautiful image" and the light was wonderful on that day, and light is always very important in his paintings.  And so you get this wonderful sense of the looping line that he then creates into this memorable image.

And on the other slide, we see this sculpture with his work on the plinth.  And in a way, it's Jeffrey having a go at himself as well as abstract painting but it's kind of double-edged.  It's paradoxical.  You see the graffiti on the plinth.  The sculpture - it's no longer the man on a horse on a plinth.  It's an abstract line drawn in the air with this beautiful, evocative sky. Then this work, you might like to...

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Well, again, you see that interest in architecture, that interest in shape and pattern making.  Those blocks that are - they're near identical but, of course, there's always those details that draw your attention to the fact that this is drawn from the real world as much as there is magic in that sense of abstraction.  We can't help but look at this work post-COVID as being a very COVID-style image, of someone sort of taking a breath, getting some air, after being locked in their apartment all day.

But we'll turn now to the last image in the show and the last image actually Geoffrey ever created.

DR DEBORAH HART:  That's right.  So this is the end of this talk and also the end of the exhibition.  So this is a work called 'Labyrinth' and Jeffrey painted this when he was 90 years of age.  He was in a wheelchair.  He'd been getting very frail but he was so fortunate that he had this moment of inspiration.  He was looking at a book cover of a maze and the image struck him really as being a metaphor for life, the way we find our way through the twists and turns of life.  And he's turned it from a green maze into a stone one and he's called it a labyrinth, even though, in effect, it is a maze.

And in that image, he actually includes a little portrait.  He usually, as we said before, didn't say who the portraits were of but, in this case, he said it was H.G. Wells, and that's quite interesting.  H.G. Wells actually appeared on a book cover wearing a similar outfit, this little boater hat, and H.G. Wells wrote science fiction.  Jeffrey was very interested in the metaphysical and this, in a way, is his farewell painting.  He was very proud of it because it brought together different elements of what he was trying to achieve - the construction as well as this metaphysical dimension of life, this idea of life continuing, of the past, present and future being intermeshed.  I think it is a very fine painting and a wonderful one to be able to end the exhibition with.

So I hope you've enjoyed this brief journey through Jeffrey's life and that you're really going to enjoy spending time with the works in the exhibition.  So thank you very much. (Applause).

HEATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON:  Thank you so much, Deborah and Rebecca.  I so enjoyed hearing those two curatorial threads coming together.  Such a fresh perspective and a new way of looking at Jeffrey Smart's work.

I particularly enjoyed the way, Deborah, that you spoke about these friends coming back together and these lovely relationships, Rebecca, that you speak about in the way the images come together.  I suppose that's part of the magic of curating, isn't it, thinking about your selection of works and thinking about the stories and the relationships that you do form in a three-dimensional space.  And I have to say it's one of those joys that we have working in a gallery when you step into an exhibition space and all of this work that you've done in looking at images, digitally and on paper, come together in this three-dimensional immersive experience where new relationships are formed.  So I wonder if you can share with the audience maybe some of the surprises or the delights of when you see that original work come together in new relationship within that three-dimensional space.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Well, I think you've almost kind of said it, Heather.  It's interesting how you can spend - I mean, we've spent so many times looking at digital reproductions of these works and playing with them on floor plans, on screen and on pieces of paper and putting them together, but there's nothing beats having them in the actual space and seeing how they - I mean, as Deborah says, works find their friends.  And sometimes the friends you think they had when you began aren't actually the friends they end up when you get on the wall.  So there's something really lovely about actually completing throwing everything up in the air and changing things.  That said, we didn't make too many major changes but there were a couple of moments, we thought these works marry together too beautifully not to bring them together in this instance.  They're not going to be together again for a very long time, if ever.

DR DEBORAH HART:  That's right.  There is something about the scale of the works when they come out of their crates.  It's really exciting.  But you also are holding your breath sometimes and, of course...

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Did you get the measurements right!

DR DEBORAH HART:  That's right!  And then it's also like there are a whole diversity of frames, for example.  But one thing that was great about Jeffrey's work is the imagery is so strong that that doesn't become a distraction.  So that was kind of a relief.  But it is really interesting.  And I loved something that Rebecca said.  We brought together one wall of works and sometimes you just need to sit with the works and get them to respond to each other.  It's not all about something imposed.  Suddenly there was a wall that was quite difficult and Rebecca said, "Oh, don't worry; they might not find their friends.  They might find their acquaintances" but, fortunately, they did settle and we managed to construct the wall just as we wanted.  But it's an interesting process.

HEATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON:  Thank you so much.  There is quite a fine art to curating, isn't there, and being able to respond to the energy of the works.  I'm now going to go to some questions from the audience and thank you, Rob, for your question, who asks: why did Jeffrey choose Italy as his home and his place of inspiration?

DR DEBORAH HART:  So I think when Jeffrey went to Italy for the first time in 1948, he was really taken by the art, by the culture.  Any of us - and probably many people in the audiences with us today - have really absorbed that wonderful sense of the diversity of art, of museums in Italy, the food, the culture, the atmosphere.  So he really found his place.  It was very interesting, even though he really didn't like to be called an expat.  He always said he was Australian but he just happened to choose Italy as a place that he loved to live.  But it was a whole amalgam of things.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  And it's interesting. He did say that one of his - his favourite artist ever was Piero della Francesca, an Italian painter from the Quattrocento and he came across reproductions of his work before he'd ever been to Italy, when he was in Adelaide, just in a book he bought and he was immediately - 'it was like falling in love', you know. That's what he said.  So when he did eventually move to Italy and settled in Tuscany, he was only half-an-hour drive from the frescoes that he'd admired in books for so, so long.  He used to regularly make trips and just commune with these works on his own.  One time he talks about going into a chapel and someone having left a ladder in front of one of the frescoes and being able to climb the ladder and look up into the figure - I think it was of the crucifixion, of the crucified figure of Christ - and being able to look at the paint strokes that Piero had made.  So for him there was something really important about actually viewing the works up close and being able to retrace those markings himself with his own eyes, which I think for anyone that's interested in art, that's so key to the experience, but for Jeffrey, I think having them so accessible while he himself was painting was incredibly important.

HEATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON:  Thanks, Bec.  It was also fascinating to hear you both talk about this notion of the making - the composition and the making of pictures and that inspiration that he drew from Dorritt Black and those two teachings that were coming out of Europe at the time.  I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about some of the key inspirations and maybe some of the other women in his life that really helped in that making of pictures.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Dorritt was really the key person in terms of that and he - although it's so interesting looking at her work and then looking at his.  There are so few similarities but the principles of constructing the image remain the same.  You look at his works and you think that they're spontaneous; you know, he sits down and he paints them.  He sees something while driving in a car or being on a bus and that's what he produces.  But actually it was a huge process.  He made multiple studies, and you'll see this in the exhibition.  He made multiple studies of figures and objects and in larger compositional studies that he would work and rework and rework.  Nothing in his compositions was left to chance.  Everything, even the simplest mark of rust, as Deborah pointed out earlier in our talk - the simplest rust mark or pair of red shoes was carefully calibrated within the composition so that your eye was drawn to that point of focus.  You'll notice that you will look at something that is brightly coloured and he has carefully calibrated within the composition, through the golden mean often - the most dynamic point of focus, when it is not a symmetrical composition, the point where it sits exactly in that particular third that the eye is drawn to and suddenly everything locks into together.  There was no accident when it came to creating his pictures at all.

HEATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON:  I wonder too, how many people in the audience have seen the exhibition yet, have been in this morning? That's wonderful.  So everyone is going to go into the exhibition, I'm assuming, after this talk.  So I wonder, Deborah and Bec, if you can maybe tell us what you hope that people take away from seeing this show.

DR DEBORAH HART:  So I really hope that this show attracts a whole range of audiences, both people who know Jeffrey's work and love it and the new audiences who are coming to it for the first time.  But I think even for audiences who do know Jeffrey's work, there will be surprises.  There are a lot of works that have come out of private collections and I have to say we're hugely grateful to all the lenders because it was quite hard for many of the private lenders particularly to part with their works.  I really found this more than many of the other exhibitions I've worked on.  People love living with them and I think people see them differently.  And one thing I'd love audiences to do is to spend time with the works.  Don't feel like you have to rush past them because the more time you spend, the more you discover and they start to work on you.

But I really hope that people find this journey, that you see the differences between those tonal works of the early period, that you get that atmosphere of the theatre of Rome in that middle room, which is so fascinating and probably a little less well known in some instances than his later work, and then when you go into the last room, there's this burst of colour and you see Jeffrey really confident about his artistic practice and his use of colour and geometry.

DR REBECCA EDWARDS:  Yes.  I think for me it's interesting looking at Jeffrey's images because they do seem so familiar.  They're such recognisable scenes.  They're streets, they're urban settings, they're factories, they're the industrial landscape.  They're sights we see every day, but I think what's so remarkable about what he does is he draws your attention to the most mundane, everyday elements of those scenes and you see new beauty in them.  You see beauty in their geometry.  You see beauty in the fact that there are these sort of strange little oddities, whether it is a red shoe or a discarded piece of rubbish or newspaper.  Suddenly these gain new beauty.  I hope that actually you can go out into the world around you and see beauty in the world around you.  For me, it's so strange. Now everything I see is Jeffrey Smart.  I've been looking at these images for so long that I'm driving my car to work and I'm like, "Oh, there's a Jeffrey Smart; there's a Jeffrey Smart" but it means I am looking at the world differently.  I'm looking at the world through his eyes and I hope that perhaps everyone can also - they can take some of that home with them as well and look at the world a bit differently as well.

HEATHER WHITELY ROBERTSON:  Thank you so much, Deborah and Rebecca, and to all of you who've joined us here in the James Fairfax Theatre or online, we hope that you enjoy this exhibition in a whole new way now that you've got this insight and maybe some threads and ideas of where to begin your journey with Jeffrey Smart today and to really soak up the experience of image-watching and I really like this idea that you talk about the notion of viewing and being viewed and there's something really to enjoy as you step into the space today.

We do invite all of those online to come to Canberra as well and to join the experience that is going to be very special.  Right up until 15 May we'll be showing Jeffrey Smart here at the National Gallery of Australia.  So we look forward to seeing you all here.  And enjoy the rest of your day.  Thank you so much.