Artist of the Day, November 22, 2021: John Brack, an Australian painter (1424)

 John Brack (1920 – 1999) was an Australian painter, and a member of the Antipodeans group. According to one critic, Brack's early works captured the idiosyncrasies of their time "more powerfully and succinctly than any Australian artist before or since. Brack forged the iconography of a decade on canvas as sharply as Barry Humphries did on stage."

Brack’s perfectionism, equal to that of the more prolific Fred Williams, means that only some 310 of his paintings remain extant. The biggest collections are to be found in his own National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (NGA).

During World War 2, VX107527 Lieutenant John Brack served with the Field Artillery. Brack was Art Master at Melbourne Grammar School (1952–1962). His art first achieved prominence in the 1950s. He also joined the Antipodeans Group in the 1950s which protested against abstract expressionism. He was appointed Head of National Gallery of Victoria Art School (1962–1968), where he was an influence on many artists and the creation of the expanded school attached to the new gallery building.

A realist painter of modern urban life, John Brack emerged during the 1950s in Melbourne as an artist of singular originality and independence. His highly cerebral, smooth and hard-edged painting style was unique in the context of both the expressive figuration of Melbourne contemporaries and the rapid growth of abstraction in his time.  

In his painting, Brack took as his principal subject the people and life of Melbourne, establishing a reputation for rigorously crafted insights into the complexities of urban and suburban society and consumerism. Widely read, his interest in the human condition was informed by writers including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Jean Paul Sartre.

The subjects of his paintings range from weddings, ballroom dancers and gymnasts to shop window displays and starkly confronting nudes, exemplified in Nude in an armchair 1957. Contrary to the traditions of Western art, this work presents the nude as sexless and alienated from the viewer. The impersonal nature of Brack’s nude is heightened by the stylisation of the figure, which reduces individual features to classically architectonic forms. Nonetheless, Brack viewed his subject with sympathy, understanding and compassion: When I paint a woman … I am not interested in how she looks sitting in the studio, but in how she looks at all times, in all lights, what she looked like before and what she is going to look like, what she thinks, hopes, believes and dreams.

In 1965 John Brack said, ‘For me I think that there must always be some sort of comment, but it must never be the sort of comment that could be put into words.’ His was an art of ideas that aimed to speak directly to the viewer. It was grounded in the everyday but communicated through a distinctive and highly personal language incorporating complex visual analogy, irony, humour, a sophisticated use of metaphor, and always underpinned by a deep knowledge of the history of art.

More than any other artist of his generation, John Brack was a painter of modern Australian life. Unlike his contemporaries, Brack painted neither myth nor history and when he focused on the landscape, it was the sprawl of suburbia that caught his attention rather than the ubiquitous Australian bush. Describing one of his core motivations, Brack said:
What I paint most is what interests me most, that is, people; the Human Condition, in particular the effect on appearance of environment and behaviour … A large part of the motive … is the desire to understand, and if possible, to illuminate …

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 Mr. John Brack

Self Portrait

 Mannequins, 1953

 Seated woman and man leaving café, 1946

 The aged, 1946

 Two men, 1946

 Woman and child entering tram, 1946

 The barber's shop, 1952

 Three Women, 1952

 The Jockey and His Wife, 1953

 Subdivision, 1954

The bar, 1954

The Block, 1954

 The telephone box, 1954

 Woman and Dummy, 1954

Collins St., 5 pm, 1955

 Solandra, 1955

The car, 1955

Two typists, 1955

Jockey head, 1956

The Bookmaker, 1956

Three Horses, 1956

Portrait of Tam Purves, 1958

Two Running Girls, 1959

The Scissors Shop, 1963

Barry Humphries in the character of Mrs Everage, 1969

 Sketch for 'Latin American grand finale", 1969

 Finale, 1973

 In the corner,  1973

 On Two Hands and One Foot, 1973

  Battle of the Etruscans,  1975

 On the Rings, 1976

Portrait of Fred Williams,  1979-80

 La Traviata, 1981

Double Nude I, 1982-83

Beginning, 1984

Portrait of Dr Ursula Hoff, 1985

Pinocchio on the Hands, 1992