Melbourne's own artist: John Brack

The Car, 1955
National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne

John Brack (1920-99) had a style that evolved into sketch-like paintings filled with plain areas of ordinary colours. We Australians after WW2 were not a flashy people, so his style was appropriate if he wanted to leave his mark on contemporary Australian culture. As meseon blog presented it, Brack’s own priority was to paint people; the human condition, in particular the effect on appearance of environment and behaviour. Note the chiselled planes on their faces and bodies.

At the John Brack Retrospective at the Ian Potter Centre, I was most interested in his early work, done in 1950s & 1960s. This was when he produced some of Australia’s best loved images. The paint­ing The Bar 1954 was said to be modelled on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. But anyone who ever drank in an Australian pub and saw the frantic drink­ing just before closing time at 6 PM will under­stand The Bar. If I saw this painting for the first time in Paris, Berlin or Tel Aviv, and had never heard of Brack, I'd still guess that the crowd of men depicted in The Bar were Australians. Another iconic image was Collins Street, 5PM 1955, a view of rush hour in post-war Melbourne. Set in a dull palette of browns and greys, it was a comment on the conformity of  everyday life, with all figures looking almost identical.

The Bar, 1954
National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne

More than any other Australian artist of his gener­ation, Brack was a painter of modern life. He was a realistic analyser of the ordinary, filled with some sense of dismay, but definitely painting with a loving sense of humour about his own nation. Many of these early works were satirical digs at the Australian Dream. Brack didn’t go for Australia’s central landscapes; he either examined Australia’s newly expanding post-war suburbia or he looked at individuals and families going about their daily responsibilities.

Normally when I chose a blog topic to discuss, hardly anyone in the universe has written about that particular topic. Yet half the bloggers in Australia seemed to have viewed the Brack retrospective thoughtfully. I am delighted.

Collins St 5 PM, 1955
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Melbourne Art & Culture Critic asks a good question. If Brack just created popular, non-abstract and slightly satirical images of Melbourne, then was he conservative? Or did Brack have a critical view of Australian suburban life and other elements of modern content and design that made him progressive? sarsaparilla lite is uncertain. Tim wrote "Brack’s necrotic nudes, grimacing suburbanites and creepy shop fronts retain a good deal of popular appeal. This is explicable in a way; Brack’s early stuff is either iconic in itself, or it deals with iconic imagery, but it’s also slightly odd in that these paintings are consistently acidic and nasty".

Blog Home of Acoustic Eagle was spot on. He noted that John Brack, David Boyd, Robert Dicker­son, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and other Australians wanted to uphold and represent the importance of the figurative image. This may have made them naïve (but not conservative), in comparison to the sophisticated abstract impress­ionists overseas. But the artists form­ed The Antipodeans art group and stuck to their unique Australian-ness. Just one disturbing thought. Hieronymous the Anonymous wrote that Brack came to disavow much of this early work later in his career. I hope this was not so.

The Girls at School, 1959, 
National Gallery Australia, Canberra

Undoubtedly there were artists in Europe and the USA who were finer draftsmen or who used colour better, but no-one reflected the truth of Urban Australia in the post-WW2 era better than Brack. And since I grew up in Melbourne in the 1950s, this is My Era and this is My Town. I wonder if a  Sydney-sider, the Sydney Daily Photo blog, agrees.

Men's Wear, 1953,
National Gallery Australia, Canberra