JOHN BRACK 1920-1999

Oil on canvas

Signed and dated 54 lower right

PROVENANCE
Mr and Mrs W. A. K. a'Beckett; thence by descent
EXHIBITED

John Brack, Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne, 8-17 March 1955, cat. 2
The Arts Festival Olympic Games Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, November - December 1956 (label on the reverse)
Contemporary Australian Painters, tour to eight Canadian public galleries, July 1957 - May 1958 An Australian Album: Time Past - Time Present, Georges Gallery , Melbourne, October 1964 [?]
John Brack, A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 20, illus.
REFERENCE
Alan Warren, 'Six o'clock Swill Appeals - on canvas', Sun News-Pictorial, Melbourne, 8 March 1955
Arnold Shore, 'Artist Stresses Human values', The Argus, 8 March 1955
'Art Notes: Painter's commentary on social scene', The Age, 8 March 1955
Alan McCulloch, 'Style and Subject', The Herald, Melbourne, 9 March 1955, illus. p. 22
Ronald Millar, John Brack, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, pl. 20, pp. 60-62 [misdated 1955]
Robert Lindsay et al., John Brack, A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 20, pp.14 illus. 34, 138
Sasha Grishin, The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pl. 4, illus., pp. 44-47, p. 185; vol.I, cat. 30, pp. 5-6

Born and trained as an artist in Melbourne, John Brack has come to be regarded as one of Australia's greatest twentieth-century painters. His art was very consciously a reflection of the vocabulary of his time. In the words of Patrick McCaughey, 'John Brack's modernity goes to the very centre of his art. He is, above all else, "the painter of modern life". Unlike his contemporaries and forerunners in Australia, he has painted neither myth nor history. His gaze has fallen relentlessly on the present'. (1)

The Bar, completed in 1954, was Brack's largest oil painting to date and is considered his most important early painting outside a public art museum collection. In both format and subject matter it can be seen as the companion piece to the iconic Collins Street 5 p.m. of 1955, in the National Gallery of Victoria.

The composition of The Bar quotes directly from one of the most famous images of the international modern movement, Edouard Manet's A bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1882, which Brack at that time knew in reproduction from his intensive study of European art. Brack's biographer, Dr Sasha Grishin, points out that the dimensions of the two canvases are almost identical. However, 'while the compositional arrangement of a barmaid standing in front of a bar mirror which reflects the people in the bar, and confronting an unseen beholder is common to both paintings, artistic intent and purpose are quite different. The contrast could hardly be greater than between the glitter of the Parisian music hall... and an austere Melbourne suburban bar with its exclusively male, ritual six o'clock swill, as the drinkers attempt to beat the closing time. On the simplest level The Bar is an ironic social comment that the least artistically informed viewer could understand, but one that invites changes to conventional modes of perception, making people see their surroundings afresh'.(2)

As Grishin explains, recognising the parallel with Manet opens up another level of irony with the substitution of the dry, hard-faced protagonist (modelled in fact on a local milkbar attendant) for the beautiful but melancholy Parisian barmaid. Brack has included his own self portrait at the extreme right, whilst an old army friend, John Stephens, in hat and glasses (who appears again in Collins Street, 5 p.m.), takes the place of Manet's tall top-hatted bourgeois customer.
Thi