Jeffery Smart. Master of Stillness. Paintings 1940-2011. Jeffery Smart. Master of Stillness . Paintings 1940-2011. Master of Stillness Jeffrey Smart First published 2012. Reprinted 2013.
by Barry Pearce

Master of Stillness 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 lived for five decades until his death in 2013.

Adelaide, where Jeffrey 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 brutish modular architecture in post-war Europe; aspects of the modern world others found ugly but which he declared beautiful.

Jeffrey Smart’s vision curiously searches for an elusive stillness in the midst of industrial change, and this can be seen and appreciated here with a selection of many of his most important masterpieces.