![]() ![]() All the activity is coming from the three young people in the foreground, who seem absorbed in their solitary games. ![]() Smart has transformed a place of work into one of leisure, although the glowering sky and the overcoats worn by some of the figures don’t make this beach seem especially inviting. In the final version, these signs of a working port have been removed, to be replaced by a neat, colourful row of parked vehicles, and a handful of figures strolling by the shoreline. ![]() The view in the distance reveals a disorderly jumble of industrial warehouses, storage depots and observation towers. A soft landing seems out of the question. In the First Study, the acrobat appears to be throwing herself around in a carpark with a dull, asphalt surface. In The Hovercraft, Boulogne, the action takes place on a bare, greyish patch of earth – presumably one of those wastelands that pass for a beach in Europe. The contrast is made even more striking by the difference in settings. The first figure’s hair is flicked back, but in the First Study the acrobat’s black hair seems to swing forward. With the other arm she reaches out and touches the ground with the very tip of her index finger. Where the acrobat in the major painting displays a degree of suppleness, with slight bends to the arms and legs, the one in the First Study, pitches into a cartwheel with one arm and both legs at full stretch. In the First Study, with which we are primarily concerned here, there is only one moving figure, but that movement is extraordinarily violent. So we can confidently refer to the acrobat as ‘she’. She had to lie on the ground and strike a frozen pose while Smart made a sketch. We know from an interview at the time, 2 that Smart based the gymnast on the young Cosima Spender, daughter of his Tuscan neighbours, Maro Gorky and Matthew Spender, and granddaughter of the poet, Stephen Spender. By Smart’s usual standards this a virtual melée! In the major painting there are three points of movement: the androgynous, cartwheeling acrobat in a bright yellow leotard, a girl in a red dress gyrating with a hula hoop, and a boy in the distance pushing another hoop. The Hovercraft, Boulogne, and First Study for Waiting for the Hovercraft, Boulogne, are exceptions to the general rule. Their actions only tend to throw the profound stillness and emptiness of the rest of the composition into even sharper relief. ![]() It could be argued that in the two earlier pictures, the figures are stiff, rather than fluid in their movements. Aside from the acrobat in The Hovercraft, Boulogne 1986-87, the only other notable instances of movement may be The Construction Fence 1978, which depicts a small girl in a pink dress running with outstretched arms, or Central Station II 1974-75, in which we see a figure running away from us, down a sunlit corridor between two hoardings. Eliot’s Four Quartets:įor Smart, stillness became a defining feature of his mature paintings. Smart built his art on stillness, the kind of stillness found in the paintings of Piero della Francesca, as celebrated in monographs by Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark or in those much-admired lines from T.S. It’s a rare occurrence in Jeffrey Smart’s work that we find a figure in motion – let alone the strenuous, spectacular motion of a gymnast. ![]()
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