John BRACK

Australian 1920–99

Two typists, 1955, is a detailed painting of two women walking to public transport at the end of the working day. It is a study made for Brack’s famous image of city life titled Collins St. 5.pm., 1955, (in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria) where the two females are seen lower right, surrounded by coated and be-hatted men, all wintry despite the leaves on the tree. The young women could represent modern beauty, one with the gamin face and hair of Audrey Hepburn, the film star; the other, a proper young lady of the 1950s in a hat. In Two typists Brack’s wit and allusion comes into play with the walking feet that disturbingly hang down from the top of the painting. John Brack stood for many days at the same place in Collins Street, watching the rush hour when office workers poured in lockstep towards their transport home.

Dr Ursula Hoff, who employed the artist in the National Gallery of Victoria print room after he had finished study at the Gallery School, wrote of Brack’s paintings in the introduction to the catalogue of his exhibition with Fred Williams at the Australian National Gallery, 1967:

John Brack’s work reflects a different world. His concern is not landscape but figure painting, his stage is the city. Adopting a note of ironic detachment, he does not turn his life models into Venus or Diana, or even ‘The bather’, but portrays them posing in cold rooms on hard settees as the unclothed human beings they are.

Jennifer Phipps

The thin nude in Nude with dressing gown, 1967, teeters in a precarious space. The floor tips up and leads away behind her while she pulls on her mundane towelling robe, hair and cotton texture meticulously crafted by the artist.

Jennifer Phipps

The flattened cubist space and a slightly disorienting frame around and behind Confrontation, 1978, make us aware that we are contemplating a meta-painting. The umbrella handle overlooking the confrontation has many meanings: a sentinel awaiting the result of the inevitable confrontation taking place before it. Helen Maudsley said of this drawing:

It is the content of the picture that defines the meaning, very often by similarity of shape as in the umbrella handle that becomes the Shepherd’s Crook, the Religious man, God’s Representative, between Being and No Longer being—between Inside and Outside.1

1 Helen Maudsley, quoted in T. Gott, A question of balance. John Brack 1974–1994 (exh. cat.), Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2000, p. 12.

Jennifer Phipps