The Cable Coils 2000-01

JEFFREY SMART (1921-2013)

The Cable Coils 2000-01

oil on linen
80.0 x 125.0 cm; 94.5 x 139.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART

Provenance:
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (label attached verso)
Private collection, Queensland
Acquired from the above, private collection, New South Wales

Exhibited:
Jeffrey Smart - Recent Paintings, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 4 September - 6 October 2001, cat.1 (illus. exhibition catalogue)
Jeffrey Smart - The Estate of the Artist and Select Important Paintings, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 31 May - 25 June 2016, cat.15 (illus. exhibition catalogue, label attached verso)

Reference:
Allen, C., Jeffrey Smart: Unpublished Paintings 1940-2007, Australian Galleries Publishing, Melbourne, 2008, p.227 (illus.)

Related Works:
First Study for The Cable Coils 2000-01, ink and watercolour on paper, 16.0 x 23.5 cm, private collectionSecond Study for The Cable Coils 2000, oil on canvas, 37.0 x 48.0 cm, private collectionLarge Drawing for The Cable Coils 2000, charcoal on paper, 80.0 x 120.0 cm, private collectionDrawing for Etching, The Cable Coils 2001, mixed media on paper, 42.5 x 66.0 cm, private collectionThe Cable Coils 2001, etching and aquatint, edition of 80, 40.0 x 65.0 cmWe gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Stephen Rogers with cataloguing this work

Estimate: $650000 - 850000

Result Hammer: $675000

For Jeffrey Smart, a constant ambition was to reconcile the forms of classical and neo-classical art with contemporary subject matter. His method was deadpan rather than didactic – there was no moral to his pictorial stories, no lesson that he needed to impart. The challenge he set himself was to craft a scene of formal beauty from the everyday things that surround us - things that are often ignored, rendered all but invisible by the psychic editing we practice on an instinctive basis.

The Cable Coils is a textbook example of this process. It shows a collection of large coils of industrial-strength cable piled up in a grassy field. A small child sits on the coil in the bottom left of the picture, allowing us to gauge its massive scale. This is a common enough sight in places where construction work is taking place, perhaps the laying out of a new housing development. Judging by the repetitive row of apartment blocks that runs across the horizon line, we shouldn’t expect any architectural marvels.

Smart’s long term partner, Ermes De Zan, recalls: ‘The subject of the plastic coils may have been inspired by seeing a road team laying down cables at Posticcia Nuova, but Jeffrey sketched these ones at the builder’s yard at Capannole, a village on the way to Bucine.’(1)

It's a curious fact that the owners of this painting are the purchasers of Smart and De Zan’s house in Posticcia Nuova, where the painting was on the wall from 2017-20. 

In The Cable Coils, the artist’s conjuring trick is to make something magical out of base materials. He would look hard at things most of us would pass by without a glance and find his subjects in the most unlikely places. When driving, if something caught his eye it wasn’t unusual for him to stop the car and make a quick sketch. It might not have been anything most people would stop for – a car park, perhaps, a garage or a metal bridge, but Smart had an exacting, idiosyncratic eye for beauty. The humdrum structure he sketched by the side of a road would reappear, months later, transformed into a heroic monument to modernity.

Although his near-photographic style may seem antithetical to the major currents of modern art, Smart’s motifs are completely contemporary. The highways, lorries, airports and communication towers that recur throughout his oeuvre could not have been conceived by pre-modern artists. Those masters of an earlier age had rigorous ideas about what an artist should paint, and how it should be painted. The concept of ‘the picturesque’ suggested some scenes were literally ‘fit to be made into a picture’, but it’s unlikely that William Gilpin, who coined the term in 1782,(2) would have placed the products of industry in that category. 

One reads occasionally about ‘the industrial sublime’, in reference to factories spewing smoke into the air or spitting flames from some vast furnace. Such things can seem awesome and terrifying to those who don’t have to work in these places, but ‘the industrial picturesque’ sounds like a contradiction-in-terms. We think of the picturesque in terms of landscape, and of industry as the enemy of nature. 

This is not the case for Smart, who brings these opposites together in his work. His landscapes are still and peaceful, almost bucolic, but they are invested with structures of concrete, steel and glass, or criss-crossed with strips of asphalt. In other hands these would be despoiled landscapes, images of nature degraded and polluted by reckless human endeavour. With Smart, we stand and admire concrete silos, container terminals and flyovers, as if they were ideal landscapes by Claude Lorrain (1600-1682).

In terms of composition, Smart’s paintings are no less precise than anything Claude might have painted. Each picture has been worked out with a ruler and set square, using classical measures such as the Golden Mean. The colour, however, is much bolder than any work of the Claudean era. Smart loved using the clear, bright colours employed by many artists of the Italian Renaissance, but also by the Pop Artists. For The Cable Coils he has employed an unusually subdued palette – red, brown, black and grey. The dry grass is a shade of golden-brown, flecked with white highlights; the sky is a murky blueish grey, broken by a flock of white birds. The only significant interruption is the child’s pale blue dress. 

The child, the only human element in the picture, plays the vital compositional role of allowing us to recognise the vast scale of the coils. Ermes De Zan suspects there may be another aspect to the figure. 

‘Although Jeffrey used local children for scale,’ he writes, ‘there was also that threatening edge created by placing them in a menacing environment. He may have picked that up from Balthus. We saw quite a few of his exhibitions over the years and Jeffrey had met him in Rome. On this occasion, the geometra (surveyor) had turned up with his son and Jeffrey asked the boy to sit in that position. He changed the figure into a girl probably because it gave a greater sense of innocence or simply because he liked the shape of the dress.’(3) 

There is, perhaps, a hint of menace in this child sitting by herself under a leaden sky, but Smart provides us with only the faintest trace of a story. The child could be there for any reason whatsoever. She might be a lonely runaway considering her next move, or simply posing for a family photo. Although she is an important element in the composition, for the artist she is of secondary value to the massive coils.

De Zan says that Smart’s chief interest lay in ‘the problems of rendering elliptical volume in space.’4 In preparing this painting he made two small studies and a large drawing. He would also produce an etching and aquatint, and a preparatory drawing for the print. Needless, to say, these are only the works he was willing to exhibit. It would have required many drawings and studies to work out how these coils were to be arranged and painted.

Smart’s archivist, Stephen Rogers, argues there is an S-curve in the composition that begins with the seagulls, touches the head of the child – at the intersection of two large coils – and is continued by the line of cable that drops off the coil beneath her feet.5 Knowing Smart’s passion for geometry, it’s a very credible suggestion. The coils themselves don’t seem to fit into any obvious geometric configuration, although Smart would have experimented extensively with placement. 

It may be that The Cable Coils depicts one of those faux monuments that appear regularly in the artist’s work. We know the gigantic coils are merely waiting to be put to practical use, but for one brief moment – immortalised in a snapshot which is also a painting – they become a public sculpture created by some anonymous abstractionist. This is the same visual joke we find in paintings such as The Oil Drums 1992 and Playground at Mandragone 1998. In an earlier picture, The Sculptor with Work in Situ 1984-85, the sculpture is a snaking mass of coil, based on a garden hose.

One could trawl over Smart’s work finding further examples, but it would be wrong to think he was only being satirical about the abstract works we erect in public places at vast expense. It’s equally possible to see The Cable Coils as a visual echo of the ruins of the classical past, with those coils lying flat on the ground imitating the bases of lopped-off pillars that once supported the roof of some great public building or temple. I say this, knowing of Smart’s lifelong fascination with the architecture of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, a favourite site being Paestum, those wonderfully preserved temples down the coast from Amalfi.

The coils with their severe forms recall the Greek preoccupation with geometry, a subject discussed by all the major philosophers in both scientiffic and mystical terms. It wasn’t only an appreciation of mathematical utility, but a key to the cosmos. The famous motto written above the door of Plato’s Academy was: ‘Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here.’

 Smart would have been admitted with no difficulty. He demonstrates his geometrical mastery in The Cable Coils, with those crisp, elliptical shapes scattered across a field, some isolated, others heaped randomly on top. It’s a image of order turning into disorder, as the classical certainties of the past are broken down. If there is a lingering sense of menace about this scene, as De Zan suggests, it may be more than a small child that is being threatened. In his oblique way, Smart is providing us with a melancholy vision of the fate of all great empires. It’s a universal, age-old tale of hubris that never loses its relevance.

Footnotes:

1. Email correspondence between the author, Stephen Rogers and Ermes De Zan, 28 September 2024

2. Gilpin, W., Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, printed for R. Blamire, sold by B. Law & R. Faulder, London, 1782

3. Rogers & De Zan, op. cit.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

John McDonald

John McDonald is film critic for the Australian Financial Review, and was, for many years, art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald.  He is the author of Jeffrey Smart: Paintings of the ‘70s and ‘80s. 

• 

  Cameron Menzies, Chairman & Head of Private Sales

  cmenzies@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 466 636 142 

• 

  John Keats, Chief Executive Officer

  jkeats@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 3 9832 8700
  +61 (0) 403 159 785

• 

  Catherine Baxendale, Senior Art Specialist

  cbaxendale@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 2 8344 5404
  +61 (0) 423 067 180

• 

  Asta Cameron, Art Specialist

  acameron@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 3 9832 8700
  +61 (0) 400 914 088

• 

  Clementine Retallack, Art Specialist

  cretallack@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 2 8344 5404
  +61 (0) 478 493 026