Author Description

Since the 1999 retrospective organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Jeffrey Smart has consolidated his position as one of the most outstanding Australian painters of the 20th century. Now at the age of 90 it is possible to assess his achievement in this comprehensive monograph by Barry Pearce, which covers the artist's oeuvre from the earliest works painted in Adelaide to the most recently completed paintings. Over five decades Jeffrey Smart has produced a body of work which reflects and comments on the life of our time in a way that would have pleased Baudelaire who urged artists to look about them for their subject matter in his essay 'The painter of modern life'.