Homage to a master of the still life Jeffrey Smart 1921–2013 The bicycle race (Death of Morandi) 1966 oil painting on hardboard 58.5 x 68 cm Warwick and Jane Flecknoe Bequest Fund, 2015 Jeffrey Smart painted The bicycle race (Death of Morandi) at a critical point in his career. Three years earlier, he had painted the iconic Sydney scene Cahill Expressway 1963 before returning to Europe. Living in Rome, Smart travelled regularly to a friend’s villa, Il Bacio, in Florence, developing along the way a rich repository of iconography for The bicycle race, considered one of his masterpieces from this seminal period.
In the work, Smart captured some of the prevailing pictorial concepts and visual metaphors he would include in later work. The enclosed urban landscape without a vestige of the natural world, the curved sweeping road and its geometric markings, the dissected street and advertising signs and the unidentified, lone figure all complete the stage for a human drama that will never unfold, forever frozen by Smart’s enigmatic knack for stillness. Two years earlier, Italian artist Giorgio Morandi had died, and the obscured signage in the upper-right corner of the painting is probably Smart’s oblique homage to this master of the still life whose retrospective was held in Bologna in the same year Smart painted this work.
Jeffrey Smart The bicycle race (Death of Morandi) 1966 © The estate of Jeffrey Smart
Smart was born in Adelaide in 1921. He became great friends with artist Jacqueline Hick, and the pair travelled to Europe and London in 1948. On his return to Australia in 1950, Smart’s career developed significantly with a number of solo exhibitions and the award of the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize for Wallaroo 1951, also in the national collection. He permanently settled in Italy in 1964, where he acquired the farmhouse Posticcia Nuova, on the outskirts of Arezzo, heralding a sustained period of stability. Smart died in 2013 and the NGA in Canberra hosted an official memorial in his honour. Lara Nichols, Assistant Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture
SUMMER 2015 | ARTONVIEW 65