JOHN BRACK
National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, until
January 31, 2010
John Brack (1920–99) emerges from this impressive retrospective as a central
figure in the canon of modern Australian art, the coeval of the more
familiar Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams. Yet his work is barely
known outside Australia and, within it, he is most intensely admired in his
native Melbourne. The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, by way of
example, declined to take the current retrospective.
After some early experiments in the 1940s, Brack settled for subjects and
styles that were at odds with the Expressionist ethos of his generation. He
had no interest in landscape painting, either. Urban and suburban experience
were his main subjects and barely a tree grows in the wasteland of
Melbourne’s sprawling suburbs and subdivisions. Bleakness and emptiness
prevail. Brack was privy to that experience and painted it unflinchingly.
His self-portrait of 1955 is the key work: in it he holds a razor to his
cheek – no sign of shaving soap – and stares desperately at the viewer. The
shower head and the greenish-yellow tiled walls of the bathroom add to the
desperation of the trapped subject.
Brack’s early anxiety found other disturbing outlets in a series of still
lifes which feature, for example, a butcher’s block apparently waiting for
the fall of the meat cleaver or a row of metallic slicing machines, vicious
and dangerous even in repose. Brack’s work for the next forty years searched
for ways to understand or accommodate the barrenness of Australian urban and
suburban life and the angst which accompanied the boredom.
In the same year as the lacerating self-portrait, Brack produced his
much-anthologized “Collins St 5pm”. A parade of regimented office workers
marches through Melbourne, the image of “the lonely crowd”, a slogan of the
decade. The work reprised that familiar Modernist theme of the ennui of
bourgeois life, but rooted it in an Australian context. Brack, well read in
modern literature in a culture with a paucity of modern art, once suggested
that Eliot’s familiar lines – “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many /
I had not thought death had undone so many” – echoed in his mind and the
painting.
Although a figurative painter, Brack remained a quintessential Modernist. He
took seriously Baudelaire’s injunction to paint modern life and he fitted
exactly the Baudelairean description of “the solitary man, gifted with an
active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert”.
Where Nolan tracked the fate of his nineteenth-century explorers in the
outback or stood the bushranger Ned Kelly, helmeted and heroic, amid the
blaze at noon, Brack found his subjects in the quotidian world of menswear
shops and barber’s saloons.
“The Bar”, the interior pendant to “Collins St 5pm” , transposed Manet’s “Bar
at the Folies Bergère” to a Melbourne pub and its then notorious six o’clock
swill. A frieze of glum and joyless drinkers speed drink their way to
closing time; we see them reflected in the mirror behind the fixed smile of
the middle-aged barmaid who has seen and heard it all. They substitute
grimly for Manet’s ambivalent celebration of modern life. Even when painting
allegorically, as in “The Return of the Prodigal Son”, Brack returns his
prodigal to a frugal, working-class house complete with pleased, if dowdy,
mum and silent dad. A series of watercolours, drawings and prints on the
races epitomized Brack’s view of the aridity of Australian life, noting “the
almost total absence of gaiety”.
In 1959 Brack participated in the Antipodean exhibition, and signed, along
with Charles Blackman, Arthur and David Boyd, Robert Dickerson, John
Perceval and Clifton Pugh, the infamous Manifesto drafted by the art
historian and critic Bernard Smith, with its polemical defence of the image
in the face of abstraction. Embarrassed almost instantly by the rhetoric of
the Manifesto, Brack resigned from the group and painted an anti-Antipodean
Wedding series in which European influences from Dubuffet’s art brut to
Brancusi’s “Kiss” abound. They proved to be the most unbuttoned pictures
Brack would ever paint. The terrible forced jollity of the modern wedding,
in which bride and groom metamorphose into the same substance as the wedding
cake, culmimates in the clumsy sexuality of “The Golden Embrace”.
The 1960s brought significant changes to Brack’s art and career. In 1962 he
moved from being the art master at Melbourne Church of England Grammar
School to Head of the Gallery School. Although the position gave him his own
studio, he was a conscientious principal and devoted time and effort to his
students. His own work suffered and he painted less. But what he did produce
was quite remarkable and moved him well beyond the graphic style of the
1950s with its occasional, unfortunate overtones of Bernard Buffet. Instead,
a rich and resonant chiaroscuro occupied the canvases, as new to Brack as
the startling subject matter.
On his daily walk up Swanston Street to the school, Brack passed a number of
medical supply shops. The window displays of prosthetic devices and surgical
implements became the object of fascination. They formed a silent theatre of
pain and torment. The mordant irony of his new paintings lay in their
transformation of the therapeutic into the macabre. In exotic still lifes,
now imagined with the energy of genre painting, Brack had found the perfect
vehicle for commentary on la comédie humaine.
Brack left the Gallery School after six years. With the generous support of
the Sydney dealer Rudy Komon, he was at last able to paint full-time. When
he held his first one- man show in Sydney in 1970 and unveiled a new series
on the theme of competitive ballroom dancing, the work was greeted with
dismay. Hard and brassy surfaces, the lurid, high-key palette of crimson,
magenta and acid yellow, the robotic imagery – all of it frightened critics
used to the cooler, early ironies. Today, they read like electric allegories
of modern life: the corseted sensuality, the faux intimacy and the
rictus-like smile of the competitors in evening dress with numbers pinned on
their back. The lineage of the series – typical of Brack’s learned instinct
as an artist – goes back to Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge and Edvard
Munch’s “Dance of Death”. They are highly prized.
For all his hidden anxieties, Brack always had the resilience of high
intelligence. Unabashed by the poor reception of the Ballroom series, he
returned to genre painting with a group of youthful gymnasts, all stretch
and strain, innocence and uncertainty, and to a series of formal studio
nudes. During the anxious 50s, Brack had painted a group of awkward but
compelling female nudes for which he used the same middle-aged model, gawky
and plain. Very much the “northern” versions of the subject, Brack’s early
studies deprived the figure of the erotic and the sensual. Twenty years
later, the nudes were more elaborate affairs. The models became suburban
odalisques, the calm centre of his spare and bare studio in which the
floorboards tilted erratically. Seated or standing, reclining or falling
asleep on a divan, these impassive nudes were always accompanied by a
Persian carpet at their feet. The balance of elaborateness and austerity, of
ceremony and informality, of sensuality and impersonality, placed them among
the painter’s grandest designs.
The last decade or so of Brack’s working life – he stopped painting in 1994 –
belongs to still lifes. He reinvented the genre and gave it complexity and
substance. These late works began with unusual choices of objects, such as
cutlery and walking sticks, oddly disposed on the canvas or suspended in
space, and gave way to an astonishing series of pens and pencils standing
upright, marshalled into armies and commanded by playing cards, sometimes
forming words like “Pro and Con”. After an epic “Battle” of pens and
pencils, laid out on the order of engagement at Waterloo, the artist turned
to postcards. A reluctant traveller abroad, Brack held the view that the
world’s great art galleries were now more concerned with selling postcards
to tourists than with showing the heritage of nations. On immaculately
painted-glass or marble-topped tables, supported by articulated wooden hands
or upright, open scissors, Brack would arrange constructions of postcards,
details of kings and queens or the royal hunt of Assurbanipal or the Bayeux
Tapestry, like mock-heroic epics of the past. The grandeur that was Greece
and the glory that was Rome came down to a three-by-four-inch postcard. The
paintings were brilliant, ironic. Still life now bore the burden of the
past, the weight of history painting.
John Brack is one of the most moving Australian exhibitions I have ever seen.
Kirsty Grant, its curator, has written an admirably direct essay in the
well-illustrated, if confusingly designed, catalogue. Her account redeems in
part the obtuseness of leading reviews in The Age (“the pens and pencils are
both pompous and corny”) and The Australian (“a generally unsympathetic
approach to the subject”), which marked a nadir even in the flatlands of
Australian art criticism.
Patrick McCaughey is a former Director of the Yale Center for British
Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
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