Painting

This timely monograph presents the life and work of an artist whose paintings have altered the way we see the modern world, particularly the industrial landscapes fringing our cities. Jeffrey Smart’s intensely realised paintings have the effect of making the ‘familiar strange’. They force us to reconsider both our relation to and perception of man-made environments, dominated as they are by factories, apartment blocks, freeways and street signs. Smart’s paintings display a mastery of classical composition, light and perspective as well as revealing the artist’s ongoing concern with the interplay between realism and abstraction. The 252 plates included in this volume allow the reader to appreciate the development of Smart’s unique oeuvre over a period spanning more than sixty years. Accompanying these illustrations is a text by Australian modernist scholar and curator Barry Pearce. This provides a valuable addition to the existing literature on the artist.

In a 2004 article for Art AsiaPacific, Simon Winchester reflected on a ‘sermon’ he had attended by Benjamin Buchloh, one of the ‘high priests’ of contemporary art theory and criticism. To his dismay, Winchester found Buchloh’s paper (on the German artist Gerhard Richter) completely baffling. ‘Save for a scattering of prepositions, I understood not a single word of what he said that day. He spoke in a language that I found entirely unfamiliar, about a subject I found impossible to determine.’ Undeterred, Winchester set himself the task of trying to understand Buchloh’s language. After two years of diligent study, however, he remained nonplussed. His conclusion is that Buchloh speaks as Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘sophistical rhetorician’ wrote: as a ‘man inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’.

Geoffrey Bardon spent just two and a half  years, from the start of 1971 until mid-1973, at Papunya, 200 kilometres west of Alice Springs. While he was there, teaching art and craft as well as social studies, Aboriginal art changed. A group of Aboriginal men began painting with Western materials, transferring versions of their traditional sand designs onto boards in a way they had not before, or not in that quantity. One of the biggest questions about Bardon is how much he mattered to this new art – at crudest, would Papunya painting have happened without him?

The tempting cover leads to a feast of 164 colour pictures, which you will fall upon with delight. Despite the title, almost all are of Melbourne and Sydney, places most Australians know well enough to enjoy pleased shocks of recognition. There are two highly specific Perth roofscapes, but a futurist speeding tram in Adelaide could be anywhere, and so could the industry at Yallourn, or sexual and racial tension at Townsville in 1942. Even if you come from the bush, you will know the city markets, cathedrals, law courts, showgrounds, Circular Quay and Harbour Bridge, Flinders Street Station and Collins Street trams, Town Hall concerts, Tivoli showgirls, Manly, St Kilda, racy Kings Cross lats, a frisson of ‘slums’. The author says he chose the works of art solely for their subject matter, yet he certainly appreciates aesthetic force. It’s a lively anthology of transport and other social nodes, parklands, beaches, building construction, shopping, entertainment. It makes the familiar look unexpectedly interesting.