John Brack Australian, 1920 - 1999

Crossley Gallery, Melbourne; acquired by the present owner in 1979

Private collection, Melbourne

John Brack: Works on Paper, Crossley Gallery, Melbourne, 17 August 1979, cat. 4

Robert Lindsay, John Brack, A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 132 

Sasha Grishin, The Art of John Brack¸ Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, p. 146, vol. II,  cat. p247, p. 68

Born and trained as an artist in Melbourne, John Brack has come to be regarded as one of Australia’s greatest twentieth-century painters. Brack was highly independent painter and, although he was a member and secretary of the ‘Antipodean' group in the late 1950s, never really belonged to any organized movement or fully subscribed to any of the prevailing popular styles. Dr Sasha Grishin, the artist’s biographer, considers the ‘pencil’ paintings the most intensely deliberate of all Brack’s series and also the ‘one that presents fewest parallels in contemporary art’. 

'The pencil paintings are Brack's most openly analytical works, in which he communicates several kinds of information about the way he perceives the nature of the world. They include information about the painter's materials and the role and perception of the art object as well as information dealing with the artist's intellectual processes. Having created an emotional neutrality, an impersonal art free of passionate flourishes, and also having freed himself from the need to watch exhibitions sales and the art market, Brack systematically plots this series as a planned progression towards an ultimate solution, with each painting a beautifully thought-through step…The earliest paintings and drawings which belong to this series, such as March and Halt and Confrontation, all of 1978, involve the idea of social regimentation and man's innate capacity to structure into groups… The pencils and pens stand as metaphors as much for soldiers and their commanders as for office workers and their chiefs, or any other grouping. Once the grouping has formed, then rivalry and opposition seem inevitable. In this sense Brack does not attempt to study the individual elements of the whole  but, like the structuralists, attempts to study the network of interdependence which makes up the whole - relationships which unite but, particularly. which separate these elements… Throughout, his basic antinomical conviction prevails that if something is said to be true, so too must be its opposite. If something separates society it must also be the same thing that unites it’.¹

This superb watercolour and ink is closely related to the larger oil painting of the same title, also of 1978.²  Eight regimented ‘units’ of differently coloured pencils – red, two greens, blues, browns and purple – seem poised to group and regroup. Their ‘leaders’, the sharp dip pens, raise playing cards like military standards. As Gary Catalano concluded at the time of the artist’s major retrospective in 1987, ‘Brack obviously possesses a mind of some incisiveness and distinction. This makes him an unusual figure in the history of art, as does the consistently high level of achievement he has maintained. His admirers are correct in claiming that he has not produced one uninteresting painting during 40 years of activity’.³

1. Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pp. 145-46.
2. For the larger oil, see Grishin, op. cit., vol. II, cat. o254, illus. p. 166.
3. The Age, 4 June 1987.