Master of stillness. Jeffrey Smart paintings 1940 – 2011

Adelaide : The Wakefield Press, 2012 (2021 reprint). Quarto, boards in dustjacket, pp. 136, illustrated. New copy.

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.

Praise for Master of Stillness:

‘It is fascinating to trace the development of the artist’s discovery of beauty in lines, textures and shapes, from the early examples of still life, to the buildings and fences, roads and bridges, leading to his last and ultimate work ‘Labyrinth’, with the portrait of H.G. Wells, a small figure placed in the maze of straight stone walls with shadows making triangles amid the rectangular shapes … A wonderful celebration of a great Australian artist – it is a book to treasure, and deserves a place in the art section of every library. – Helen Eddy, ReadPlus