Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart was a true painter of modern life, finding arresting beauty in the crisp outlines of the built environment and prosaic icons of urban existence. Although deriving subject matter from what would appear disturbing about the modern world, bleak highways and impersonal architecture, his paintings were not commentaries on urban alienation. Rather, Smart rejoiced in the beauty and oddity he perceived, translating momentary glimpses of the everyday into impeccably composed harmonies of colour, shape and line, all imbued with pictorial intelligence and wit.

In 1965, Smart returned to Italy to live, settling in 1971 at Posticcia Nuova, a rustic farmhouse near Arezzo in Tuscany. Close to the works of Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, whose passion for stillness, light and geometry inspired him, it became his home for life. Familiarity with the area saw him directing attention upon otherwise unremarkable motifs passed daily: traffic signs, bus stops, overpasses and apartment blocks, transforming them into meticulously composed modern masterpieces.