Jeffrey Smart

Iconic Australian painter and draughtsman Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide and trained at the South Australian School of Art between 1937 and 1941 and later at the Academe Montmartre with painter Fernand Leger in Paris in 1949. Smart was the art critic for the daily telegraph in Sydney from 1952 to 1954 and was awarded the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1951. Smart was the drawing teacher at the National Art School, Sydney from 1962 to 1963, before relocating to Italy in 1964 where he worked and lived until his death in 2013. He has held solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. His works have been included in international group exhibitions at the Whitechapel and the Tate, in London. In 1999 the Art Gallery of New South Wales held a major retrospective of his work. His work is represented by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; all state galleries, several regional and tertiary galleries and internationally by the Met Museum in New York. Monographs on his work include ‘Jeffrey Smart: paintings of the 70’s and 80’s’ 1990; ‘Jeffrey Smart’ 2005; ‘Drawings and studies: 1942 – 2001’; ‘Unpublished paintings 1940 – 2007’, and Smart’s memoir ‘Not Quite Straight’ was published in 1966.