John Brack

This major exhibition of John Brack's oil paintings, works on paper and prints is drawn almost exclusively from the collection of the Australian National Gallery. As this artist's overall output has been relatively small — some 650 paintings and drawings produced over about fifty years of consistent work — it is surprising that major collections of his work can be found at this gallery and at the National Gallery of Victoria. These collections also highlight the curious position that Brack's work occupies in Australian art. Despite having painted one of the most popular and often reproduced urban icons in Australian art, Collins Street, 5.00 p.m., 1955 (National Gallery of Victoria), Brack has never been a truly popular painter. He has never enjoyed a personality cult like, for instance, Sir Sidney Nolan, nor has his work attracted imitators, as is the case with Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams.

Brack is viewed as an artist's artist, collected by galleries and connoisseurs, and one who makes no concessions to popular tastes, styles or prevailing orthodoxies in the art museum world. He deliberately seeks to negate the presence of the artist in the work, and the intricacy, complexity and sophistication of his pictorial language discourages followers. He is also a very private person, who has shunned promotional publicity and who, unlike many of his peers, frowns on the practice of making artists public figures, weighed down with honours and committees. His work, both in its subject matter and its style, relates uneasily to mainstream trends in Australian painting and contradicts many of the accepted conventions. John Brack's work focuses on an urban reality, disregarding the traditional Australian obsession with the landscape. Although he emerged as a painter in the fifties, when the taste for abstract art was in its ascendancy in Australia, he remained a staunch figurativist. When the tone of Australian art was governed by romanticism, and vibrant and energetic self-expression was deemed a virtue, he argued for an art which was reserved and cerebral, devoid of emotional expression.

Attempts to place Brack within a movement or a prevailing style in Australian art have been singularly unsuccessful. Although he was secretary of the Antipodean group of painters in 1959 and a signatory to its manifesto — which strongly promoted the cause of figurative art — he was a reluctant member of this circle. It was for him a short, unhappy association and, in retrospect, he found he had little in common with the other Antipodeans. An attempt made in 1983 to link him with a 'cool sensibility' peculiar to Melbourne art served more to stress his individuality than to establish his common heritage with a 'School of Cool'. Within the Australian context he has remained essentially a loner, more admired and respected than understood.

The roots of John Brack's art, his philosophy and his intellectual concerns all point more to Europe than to Australian counterparts and parallels. In part this can be explained as a peculiarity of his introduction to art. Born into a strict Presbyterian working class Melbourne family in 1920, he was forced to abandon his secondary school education because of the depression and, in 1935, found work as a clerk in an insurance firm. He recalls this period with a degree of bitterness: 'l was a loner, totally alone, didn't have any friends ... all I was doing, but not consciously, was trying to find out who I was'. This search led him to literature and he spent his evenings in the public reading room of the State Library of Victoria engrossed in Eliot, Pound, Auden, Dostoevsky, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Wyndham Lewis and Yeats. 'Every time I picked up a book between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, I was looking for something to help me. I had the hunger of the self-educated.'

An encounter with two reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh encouraged him to enrol as an evening student at the Melbourne National Gallery School in 1938, where he studied drawing for two years under Charles Wheeler. Brack also visited the 'Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art' every day during its three-week showing in Melbourne in October 1939. Then, in 1940, when one could have expected him to be drawn into the circle of other painters, Brack enlisted in the army and, for the duration of the war, served as an artillery officer. It was during the six crucial, formative years spent in the army, when he experienced total isolation from art and the art community, but continued to read European literature avidly, that he arrived at a number of binding decisions concerning the nature and purpose of his future work.

The author who made the greatest impact on his thinking was Henry James, particularly his The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York, 1937). Here James advanced what could be termed a theory of art based on such ideas as the unexpected nature of inspiration, the importance of a significant humanist theme in a creation, the use of humour and irony, and the necessity of a technical challenge for the artist. When Brack was discharged from the army as a lieutenant in 1946, he felt that he had already decided on his artistic course. His work would have calmness, formality and irony, yet would also be serious and would engage society. He had already found in his reading of early Anglo-Saxon elegies, such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer from the Exeter Book, c. 975, the sort of tone that he wished to achieve — a sense of detachment and universality, and a note of steady greyness that could be maintained over a long period of time. With this in mind, he returned to Melbourne and enrolled at the National Gallery School under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, hoping to achieve the formal means with which to express his ideas. Although Brack elected to study under the conservative tonal realist William Dargie at the school between 1946 and 1949, he was essentially left alone and could later describe himself as largely a self-taught painter.

Men's wear, 1953, was a major painting in Brack's first solo exhibition. As he does in a number of his early works, the artist sets the scene within a shop interior, where the lonely proprietor stands waiting for his prey. The composition of a carefully controlled network of verticals and horizontals, the classical balance of light and dark shapes, and the tightly divided surfaces makes more than a passing reference to Seurat's La Parade. In the schematic formularization of the features, traces of the draughting technique of another French painter, Bernard Buffet, can also be seen. Although pervaded by a still reserve, the sense of anticipation in Men's wear is immense. Irony plays its role, as the shopkeeper, his eyes almost totally closed, appears even more inanimate than the dummies displaying the garments. The colours clash and are artificially gay. The light is mercilessly harsh and the whole painting seems a little overexposed. An unsettling note is created by the reflection in the mirror of an oddly truncated figure standing in the viewer's space, looking at the scene. The reading of this shadowy silhouette is ambiguous — it is a self-portrait of the artist, but also a reflection of the viewer and of the anticipated client.

Several other paintings and drawings in the Gallery's collection also deal with the shop front theme. In The happy boy, 1964, Brack approached the subject using a specific shop located in central Melbourne, which sold surgical instruments. Part of the attraction of this shop lay in its implied challenge to accepted ideas about subject matter — it represents a break with traditional artistic clichés. In the centre of the composition stands the smiling mannequin, who demonstrates surgical corsets, belts and items of elastic hosiery as he precariously balances on a folding invalid chair. Around him stand the infra-red sunlamps with their strange gaping faces, while in the background are grouped further mannequins in various states of animation. A conceptual disjunction is implied between the objects — simultaneously associated with healing and infirmity — and their display, which has been lovingly arranged like a chocolate-shop window, to tempt passers by. The contrast is heightened by the visual ambiguities which have crept into the painting: the wheelchair is ready to slide off the tilted surface, the happy boy is about to collapse, and the whole composition totters on the brink of disaster.

Brack frequently employs photographs, sketches and drawings when working towards a final composition. When he was working on The happy boy, he selected a Sunday morning as the quietest time in the city, and he and a friend set out to photograph the surgical instrument shop. To their dismay they discovered that a council crew was cleaning and repairing the tram tracks in front of the shop, and a revolving flashing light, mounted on their vehicle, was throwing a blinding red beam across the shop window. This unexpected incident lies behind the three vertical stripes of colour that divide the picture space, and the blazing red flash in the centre that brings a sense of unreality and tragic tension to the whole reflective surface of the window.

One of Brack's final encounters with the shop window theme occurs on the relatively large canvas Inside and outside (The shop window), 1972. Here the levels of visual ambiguity reach a bewildering complexity. As the shopkeeper in the gloomy subaqueous space of the interior looks out, the artist's reflection is caught in the window as he looks in. The cooking utensils in the window arrangement catch over a dozen variously distorted reflections of the artist, and the utensils themselves — with points meeting — form a tight tracery of line, and seem to be suspended in space. Where the shopkeeper's carefully delineated pinstriped suit melts into the stripes of the carpet, the tension of the surface is accentuated by the meticulousness of Brack's technique. The stability of the picture plane is gently subverted by the painting of a frame within a frame, so that the whole surface appears tilted and unstable. All the painting's planes are slightly tilted and ambiguous, and its lines are slightly curved, suggesting instability. The usual structure of paintings, with areas of light and sky above leading to darker regions and the ground, has been inverted. By its use of colour and bright illumination, this work invites the viewer to enter the lower portion of the picture space, which then merges into the dark layers above, in the reverse of audience expectations. About his shop window paintings Brack once commented: 'The exterior and the interior of the window become mixed up, they become a paradox and a paradox is something which is illustrative not only of shop windows, but the whole aspect of life itself'.

The idea that art can be read as a paradox on several levels, and that it makes a statement about truth, though expressed through contradictions, is central to the work of both Henry James and John Brack. While, in many of his earlier paintings and drawings, Brack made observations concerning reality which conceal an ironic subtext, by the sixties the levels of meaning in his work had multiplied. The paintings, drawings and prints of the ballroom series ostensibly deal with professional ballroom dancing as an activity which converts the natural and pleasurable activity of dance into an artificial and glittering ritual of exacting labour. But these images are also an allegory for life itself, in which couples are also thrown together to perform a well-rehearsed ritual within a competitive environment. The floors are polished and tilted, the bright colours shine with neon luminosity and the glare of the spotlight is cold and all revealing. The figures, wearing pinned-up smiles, are momentarily caught in a state of balance between triumph and complete disaster. Unlike some of the earlier paintings in which the artist adopts an ethical stance, and with a jaundiced eye reveals the follies of humanity with cutting, sardonic humour, in the paintings of the sixties he increasingly identifies himself with the victims he paints. On the left-hand side of Latin American Grand Final, 1969, is a self-portrait of the artist, dancing without a partner, alone and more vulnerable than the rest.

Apart from experiments with rich, lush painterly masses in the wedding series, Brack's style is informed by an incisive line which translates easily into etchings and drypoints. He is a self-taught printmaker, who made his first etchings in 1954 using the facilities of the Swinburne Technical College in Melbourne. At this time etching enjoyed only limited popularity, and Brack was experimenting with various art-forms hoping to find viable market alternatives to the expensive oil easel painting. He used prints essentially to duplicate images rather than to create them, and nearly all of his prints are preceded by sketches and finished drawings. Occasionally, as he did with the etchings associated with the surgical instrument series, the artist produced several states of a print in the process of arriving at the most satisfactory formal resolution of the work in terms of its medium. Generally, Brack's prints read more as a translation of a drawing than as an exploration of the print media.

Much of Brack's art of the seventies and eighties is concerned with the search for a visual metaphor — a language that would be universal, clear and lucid. Objects close to the artist's hand, such as knives, forks, pens and pencils, are pressed into service to stand for humanity. Whereas Brack's earlier work adopted the close-up view, and dealt with existentialist Angst and situations that were site-specific, now his concern is with the general and universal, and his work makes timeless statements that refer both to our individual predicament — with its fears and phobias — and to the overall tragedy of human existence. For example, the painting Still, 1976-77 (originally titled Then and now), may contain a reference to the conflict in Vietnam, but it also makes a general statement about all human conflict: hundreds of pens fall like military projectiles onto the postcards of Kwan Yin statues, the symbol of peace in Chinese art.

In A hand with the Etruscans, 1975, another visual metaphor is employed, that of a fully extended wooden articulated hand, held in the universal gesture of 'stop', balances on a tottering card table. Behind it are postcards of three Etruscan Canopic urns — receptacles used for the ashes of the dead — with lids in the shape of warriors' heads, representing the three ages of man. On one level this painting is a plea for an end to conflict; on another, its use of postcards — glossy images falsifying art objects — comments on the durability of ancient art, art reproduction and the idea that the 'completely fake' is preferable to the authentic, as argued in Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (London, 1987). The painting also comments on the processes of art, the artist's materials and modes of perception. The pros and cons, 1985, shows two great armies of pens and pencils assembled, holding their alphabet playing-card banners. Fundamental to any reading of the work is an understanding of Brack's antinomical philosophical stance, which argues that contradictory positions can both be true. Although the pencil armies are divided into two opposing forces, the two sides are composed of identical elements — truth applies equally to both sides.

Throughout, Brack's work has retained its consistency and integrity. Although its formal language may have changed between Latin American Grand Final, 1969, and Evening dance, 1989-90 — in which artificial figures engage in an artificial ritual in an artificial space — the central concern with humanity and the tragedy of its existence has remained constant.