Frank Jeffrey Edson Smart (Adelaide, 1921 – Arezzo, 2013) was an Australian painter who spent most of his later life in Italy. He is known for precisionist paintings of urban landscapes, filled with freeways, concrete walls and isolated figures, which combine a sense of unease with compositional balance.
After training in Adelaide and working as an art teacher, he travelled to Europe in 1948 and studied in Paris at La Grande Chaumière and at the Académie Montmartre under Fernand Léger. He returned to Australia in 1951 and settled in Sydney, where he worked as an art critic, taught and began exhibiting regularly. He moved to Italy in 1963 and by about 1965 had settled there permanently, later buying a rural property near Arezzo in Tuscany.
His painting rests on careful composition, clean lines and exact shapes. Smart maintained that the subject was almost secondary and that geometry was the real concern, an approach he associated with the golden mean. Some critics read his work as a comment on urban alienation, but he insisted that he was painting the modern world as beautifully as he could rather than making a protest.
A major retrospective that toured Australian galleries in 1999 and 2000 confirmed his reputation as one of the leading Australian painters of the twentieth century.