Jeffrey Smart dies Jeffrey Smart's Cahill Expressway. OBITUARY: Artist transformed symbols of modernity Two years ago, Jeffrey Smart declared: "I think it's time for the painting to be in abeyance." He was no longer well enough to produce his art. On Thursday morning Italy time in hospital near his home near the Italian town of Arezzo, Smart, aged 91, died peacefully of renal failure. The Adelaide-born painter, who had relocated to Italy in 1964, was with his partner of more than 30 years, Ermes De Zan, at the end. De Zan had faithfully looked after Smart, confined in recent times to a wheelchair ""like a grand old man"," said Stuart Purves, one of two gallerists who represented the painter in Australia. Smart also had respiratory problems. Purves said Smart, born in Adelaide in 1921, "hadn't been robust for the last year or so." Jeffrey Smart was renowned for his urban landscapes. Photo: Quentin Jones "He was an extremely creative man in our time who gave us new ways of seeing," said Purves. He found poetry in the suburban and urban landscape - and in colour. Another expatriate Australian, Clive James, once wrote Smart was the "modern Australian painter whose paintings look least Australian." Since his second trip abroad after World War II became a permanent stay, he has been painting that strange yet immediately recognisable area of the planet that his admirers call the Smart Country, a stretch of territory so completely international that one of its characteristic locations is an airport. It is half a century since Smart's most famous picture, The Cahill Expressway, was first commercially exhibited. Smart trained at the South Australian School of Art between 1937 and 1941 and later at the Academe Montmartre with painter Fernand Leger in Paris in 1949. Smart was the art critic for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney from 1952 to 1954 and was awarded the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1951. He was the drawing teacher at the National Art School, Sydney from 1962 to 1963, before relocating to Italy in 1964. His works have been included in international group exhibitions at the Whitechapel and the Tate, in London. In 1999 the Art Gallery of New South Wales held a major retrospective of his work. Smart had a "unique vision in Australian art," said Wayne Tunnicliffe, head curator, Australian art, at the Art Gallery of NSW. "At a time when many other artists were painting mythic landscapes or abstract paintings, he developed his distinctive coolly observant realism," he said. Smart's paintings of the city - of urban streets, isolated figures, motorways and construction sites - suggest alienation, but are also intensely familiar. We all have Jeffrey Smart moments when we pass by road signs or trucks on highways and think aha, a Smart painting! He lived for the last 50 years in an idyllic part of Tuscany, but this just seemed to hone his vision of our built environment. Jeffrey's enduring legacy will be his distinctive, very contemporary and yet classically precise paintings of the world we have built for ourselves in the latter half of the 20th century.