Frank Jeffrey Edson Smart AO (26 July 1921 – 20 June 2013) was an expatriate Australian painter known for his precisionist depictions of urban landscapes that are "full of private jokes and playful allusions".

[7] In the early 1940s he accompanied local maritime artist, John Giles, in painting industrial landscapes at Port Adelaide.

[10] Smart travelled to Europe in 1948, studying in Paris at La Grand Chaumière and later the Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger.

[3] Smart was also employed by The King's School, Parramatta in 1954–56 as an art teacher, following Jean Bellette (known there as Mrs Haefliger) and John Passmore.

Smart departed Australia for London on the Castel Felice out of Sydney just after Christmas 1963, driving to Greece with fellow painter Justin O'Brien.

[citation needed] Isolated individuals seem lost in industrial wastelands, full of high rise construction, concrete street-scapes and an eerie feeling of harmony and equilibrium – where silence and stillness create a deathly ambience.

'The express rape of the landscape' is one title hanging over Smart's paintings, referring to the freeways, street signs, trucks, oil drums, containers, buildings and concrete dividers that are the ever-present subjects of his work.

These are said to be "impassive observers, reconciled to the contemporary state of things, prepared to accommodate themselves to an increasingly impersonal environment" or as "statements on the dehumanising conformity of modern architecture and social painting".

It is Smart's precise and unequalled attention to clean lines, composition and geometrics that make his eye-catching paintings stand-out "in the story of modern Australian art".

Also referred to as 'the golden ratio', 'the divine proportion', 'the mean of Phidias' and a number of other names, it has been used since ancient Greek times in many works of art and architecture.

This complex network of interlocking rectangles, triangles and diagonal lines, is used to calculate the structure of Smart's paintings, which form the basis of all his artworks.

"Today's most prevalent myth is that Smart's work has no content: that everything is a compositional exercise devoted to capturing a formal ideal of beauty".

have argued that Smart's work comments on modern urban alienation, a post-industrial landscape that has fallen from human control.

This Mediterranean journey led to the purchase of a three-hundred-year-old villa in Arezzo, Italy where he lived for the rest of his long life.

[18] Despite Smart's identification with the ancient art and architecture of the renaissance period, he likes to be recognised as a contemporary artist, not a 'classical revivalist'.

[19] Smart mostly painted with oil, acrylic and watercolours, generally using the bold primary colours – yellow, blue and red – and dark greys for his skies.

Smart's work and life have been the subject of several documentaries, the most recent, titled Master of Stillness, by filmmaker Catherine Hunter.

Critic John McDonald calls it "a farewell picture – a last definitive statement that rules a line under a long and distinguished career".

[1] Curator, author and critic Barry Pearce, interviewed in the film, says of Labyrinth: "It is a kind of arrival at the painting he was always chasing, never satisfied, hoping the next one on the easel would be the elusive masterpiece, the one that said it all.

"[23] Hunter visited Smart at his farmhouse in Tuscany and the painter took her to some of the places near Arezzo that have long inspired him – the concrete streetscapes and urban wastelands that define his vision.

[38] Smart was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001 for his service to the visual arts, particularly through his distinctive portrayal of the urban landscape, and through the encouragement offered to young artists.