Deutscher and Hackett

Jeffrey Smart’s immaculately conceived landscape, Outskirts, Athens, 1964, with its arrangement of various corrugated hoardings in a harmonious palette of creams and pastels, presents a subtle interrogation on architecture, heritage and modernity. After having assiduously saved for many years, the young artist left Australia for Europe, arriving in London in February 1964 alongside his friend, painter Justin O’Brien. Each delighting in the history and culture of the continent, they visited museums and galleries in London and Paris, before purchasing a Simca touring car to make a 6000km journey to Greece for the spring and summer.1 The summer of 1964 in Greece would mark a period of prodigious creativity for both artists, with many great paintings, including Outskirts, Athens, realised during their long and idyllic sojourn on the Aegean island of Skyros.

With repeated corrugated fences obscuring views and the horizon line, Smart has deliberately truncated the scene presented within Outskirts, Athens. In contrast to the straightness of the fence blocking out the foreground, cleanly bisecting the picture plane, a multicoloured, patchwork fence runs along the crest of the hill in a jaunty zigzag throughout the middle of the picture plane. Smart has chosen to show the most coloured section of this barrier (and indeed the whole image) on an oblique angle, sharply shadowed against its pale and luminous flanks – a reference perhaps to the bleaching effects of time and the Athenian sun on a polychrome past?

The meticulously painted corrugation of these fences, rhythmic and alternately shadowed, starkly contrasts with smooth horizontal streaks of Smart’s unnatural sky. Throughout the centre of the frame, the embankment, the only organic element of the composition, is crumbling, its grassy topping spilling over the edges. Imposing control on the environment with structures both hard and straight edged, these painted hoardings herald the promise of post-war newness, hiding ground slated for destruction. Only a fragile string of freshly laundered clothes on a washing line visible in the centre of the image hints at human activity concealed in residential areas behind the series of hoardings. Ever the master of theatrical lighting, Smart intended to highlight this motif, noting in his preparatory sketch ‘light washing against shadowed fence.’


Outskirts, Athens, is set on the fringes of an ancient metropolis, where built structures ‘sit like monoliths.’2 Through the geographical specificity of the painting’s title and its carefully constructed composition, Smart evokes the hilltop citadel of classical Greek antiquity, the Acropolis. While in Athens, Smart had taken photos of promising motifs, contrasting the gleaming Parthenon with crowded tenements and factories at the foot of the Acropolis.3 This tongue-in-cheek compositional reference equates the mundane and grimy architecture of the suburban fringe with the UNESCO world heritage site – the cradle of democracy, Western civilisation and great oratory. Ironically, the massive lettering painted on the foremost fence is tightly cropped and only partly visible, the Greek letters of alpha and theta being the only two letters clearly defined. This semiotic obscurity was Smart’s preferred way of visually critiquing a world in which so much is said loudly, yet so little is effectively communicated. These letters are the only indication that directly locates this scene to somewhere in Greece – the rest of the scene suitably anonymous and uniform to post-war continental Europe.

Painted on Skyros, in a rudimentary fisherman’s cottage the artists had rented for the summer, Outskirts, Athens, is in fact a composite image based on motifs seen during Smart’s travels through Europe up until this point. The extended stay on Skyros provided Smart with the first uninterrupted period of painting since he had left Adelaide. While Peter Quartermaine noted that the time in Athens provided Smart with ‘enough material for the whole Skyros period’4, with Smart producing images of suburban and industrial Athens during this time (including views of the port of Piraeus), Edmund Capon identified, through an ink and watercolour preparatory sketch, that the multicoloured fences and line of washing derived from a view from Porta Portese – one of the ancient city gates of Rome, where the friends had holidayed before arriving in Athens in April.5


Outskirts, Athens was included in Jeffrey Smart’s first exhibition overseas, at Galleria Ottantotto, one of the best galleries in Rome for contemporary art in the 1960s. Smart delivered the painting to the gallery in October 1964, with more works added before the exhibition opening in April 1965. This Roman exhibition marked the start of a period of artistic prosperity for Smart. Outskirts, Athens contains an array of Smart’s preferred motifs, many of which were reused in later artworks. Clearly pleased with its visual effect, Smart reused this same motif many years later in the background of The plastic tube, 1980 (private collection). While the concealing effect of placing large built structures in the foreground was reused in similar compositions around the same time, for example with similar truncated advertising lettering in The owner, 1964 – 65 (private collection), the motif of corrugated fencing became a favourite of Smart’s – used to great effect in Corrugated Gioconda, 1976 (National Gallery of Australia), The painted factory, 1972 (private collection), The construction fence, 1978 (TarraWarra Museum of Art) and Portrait of Clive James, 1991 – 92 (Art Gallery of New South Wales).

1. Pearce, B. and Wilson, N., Justin O’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, p. 166
2. Gleeson, J., ‘Jeffrey Smart’s ‘still lives’’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 4 October 1965, p. 20
3. Pearce, B., Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 143
4. Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 1983, p. 20
5. Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001, Australian Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, p. 70

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH