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Lot Essay
Related work: Near Pisa Airport, 1990 (private collection, Melbourne); The Bridge Builders, 1990 oil on canvas, 99x71cms (private collection, Melbourne, illus. E. Capon, Jeffrey Smart, Sydney, 1999, cat. no.74, illustrated p.175)
Jeffrey Smart left Australia in 1963, and has lived for over twenty years at Posticcia Nuova, a farmhouse in Arezzo, Tuscany, approximately 150 kilometres from Pisa. Pisa has provided the inspiration for many of Smart's paintings, but more often in the form of anonymous backdrops drawn from the modern industrial environment: motorways, road signs, high-rise apartment blocks.
Typically in Smart's oeuvre, Near Pisa Airport examines the relationship between this industrial environment and the place of human beings within it. A low viewpoint makes the blue steel girder and the scale of the large iron numbers upon it overwhelming, particularly when contrasted with the small, finely painted figure of the workman in yellow overalls. The upper half of the bright yellow zero closest to the edge of the blue girder arches unsupported by the lower half of the number, and a heavy grey, cloudy sky adds to the sense of disquiet.
The red and white striped post, which bridges the sky and the structure, is a recurring device used by the artist. It is also seen in The Bridge Builders, also painted in 1990, and in The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, painted in 1977. As in that image, "The calibrated pole lies across the canvas like a ruler an sets up reverberations which give the picture an inner life." (P. Quartermaine, Jeffrey Smart,Victoria, 1983, p.84). The viewer attempts to resolve the ambiguity as the eye moves into the central scene, but is then repelled by the massive barrier of the girder in the lower third of the canvas.
According to Peter Quartermaine, "Smart's paintings have also been prescient in exploring, through images at once striking and accessible, the complex architecture of modern communication: antennae, containers, trucks, trains, motorways, bridges, pylons, airports." (P. Quartermaine, "Imaginary Homeland", Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Sydney, 1999, p.38). This exploration is not, however, an analysis of alienation; for Smart, "the technology of travel provides a mandala for meditation. This, too, is inspiration." (P. Quartermaine, op. cit., 1983, p.94).
Jeffrey Smart left Australia in 1963, and has lived for over twenty years at Posticcia Nuova, a farmhouse in Arezzo, Tuscany, approximately 150 kilometres from Pisa. Pisa has provided the inspiration for many of Smart's paintings, but more often in the form of anonymous backdrops drawn from the modern industrial environment: motorways, road signs, high-rise apartment blocks.
Typically in Smart's oeuvre, Near Pisa Airport examines the relationship between this industrial environment and the place of human beings within it. A low viewpoint makes the blue steel girder and the scale of the large iron numbers upon it overwhelming, particularly when contrasted with the small, finely painted figure of the workman in yellow overalls. The upper half of the bright yellow zero closest to the edge of the blue girder arches unsupported by the lower half of the number, and a heavy grey, cloudy sky adds to the sense of disquiet.
The red and white striped post, which bridges the sky and the structure, is a recurring device used by the artist. It is also seen in The Bridge Builders, also painted in 1990, and in The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, painted in 1977. As in that image, "The calibrated pole lies across the canvas like a ruler an sets up reverberations which give the picture an inner life." (P. Quartermaine, Jeffrey Smart,Victoria, 1983, p.84). The viewer attempts to resolve the ambiguity as the eye moves into the central scene, but is then repelled by the massive barrier of the girder in the lower third of the canvas.
According to Peter Quartermaine, "Smart's paintings have also been prescient in exploring, through images at once striking and accessible, the complex architecture of modern communication: antennae, containers, trucks, trains, motorways, bridges, pylons, airports." (P. Quartermaine, "Imaginary Homeland", Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Sydney, 1999, p.38). This exploration is not, however, an analysis of alienation; for Smart, "the technology of travel provides a mandala for meditation. This, too, is inspiration." (P. Quartermaine, op. cit., 1983, p.94).