Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart
Paintings 1940—2011

Wakefield Press

This book on the work of Jeffrey Smart is the first since his virtual retirement from painting in 2011. It illuminates the vision of the most celebrated of Australian expatriate artists, from his beginnings in Adelaide until his last major composition painted in Italy, where he has lived for the last five decades until his deat in 2013.

Adelaide, where Smart was born in 1921, was where his essential evolution as an artist took shape. His early fascination for its grid-like urban landscape was a perfect basis for an ongoing celebration of the phenomena of highways, traffic signs, trucks, transmitters and british modular architecture in post-war Europe; aspects of the modern world others found ugly but which he declared beautiful.
Jeffrey Smart’s vision, which has altered the way we see the technologies of change that impel us through the fabric of time, curiously searches for an elusive stillness that lies at the heart of it, and may be seen here and appreciated with a selection of many of his most important masterpieces.

Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart paintings 1940–2011 has been published to coincide with the twenty-first anniversary of absorption by the University of South Australia of the South Australian School of Art from which Smart is considered perhaps its greatest alumnus. In recognition of this, the University bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in 2011 and organised a retrospective through the Samstag Museum of Art, with works from the Adelaide period shown at Carrick Hill.

137 pages, illustrations and portraits (some colour), 30 x 27 cm, Barry Pearce.

OUT OF PRINT

$75.00 

Copies available for purchase through Wakefield Press