John Brack

Georges Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1970

John Brack is widely regarded as one of Australia’s great twentieth-century painters. Born and trained as an artist in Melbourne, he is now represented in all major public collections. His early master work, Collins Street 5 p.m. was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1956 (its companion painting, The Bar, was sold at Sotheby’s in April last year). The Old Time, from Brack’s great ballroom dancing series, has been in one private collection since it was first shown in Melbourne in 1970; and never exhibited since the artist’s major retrospective in 1987-8. It is the largest in the series after Latin American Grand Final, which hangs in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and is arguably the most dramatic with its powerful vertical format and close focus. Ronald Millar’s 1971 monograph, the NGV retrospective catalogue and Dr Sasha Grishin’s 1990 catalogue raisonné each gave The Old Time a full-page colour plate.

Millar wrote perceptively when the ballroom paintings were first shown, of the way in which the works re-state in more indirect terms than before many of the artist’s longstanding pre-occupations. Like the men and women heading home along Collins Street, Brack’s dancing couples are in company but also alone. Like his barmaid, the female dancing partners are absolutely held-together, often sharp featured, even hardened in their determination. As the couples swoop and swivel over the polished floor of the Grand Final arena, they embody ‘obsessions about uneasy poise and about vulnerability; ideas… about physical and psychological make-believe, and about realities behind facades. About people being alternately attracted and repelled, together intimately but separated in motive and intention. About the rituals of art and of life... But here the mood is more passionate and optimistic, more sympathetic and more mysterious, many faceted and oblique instead of frontal and finite. The dancers are perhaps John Brack’s happiest works’. ¹

He had first essayed the ballroom theme in 1960 in a group of gouaches and oils including The champion ballroom dancers, all now in the National Gallery of Australia.² Adagio – depicting ice dancers – was completed in 1967, with its background largely repainted in 1969: 'a final attempt to find a technical solution suitable for the theme’.³  Late in 1967 Brack attended the World Ballroom Dancing Championships at Festival Hall in Melbourne; he took out a subscription to The Australasian Dancing Times and collected photographs and magazine clippings. ‘I found a parallel between the jockeys and the dancers’, he said at the time, ‘Both have turned what should be a pastime into serious professional work.  I was interested, too, in the man-woman relationship of the dancers. Almost all professional dancing teams are married, so it is not so much romantic love as a 50-50 business contract’. ⁴ 

‘By using the theme of professional ballroom dancing as a visual parable that could be interpreted to stand for life itself and the whole tragedy of the human condition Brack consciously placed himself in the tradition of painters such as Goya and Munch, who also used the theme of dance as an allegory of the dance of life’. ⁵ The theatrical lighting, full skirts and sense of arrested movement in The Old Time and others in the series invite comparison with Edgar Degas’s ballet dancers – in the same way that Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère was a point of departure for The Bar. In fact Brack had learned much about stage lighting, sets and elaborate costume whilst working as a designer for the Australian Ballet in 1964. As Sasha Grishin points out, ‘Degas and Brack were both interested in scenes of the racecourse and of dancers, possibly for similar reasons. They saw in them a comment on life as well as the potential formal challenges presented by the subjects… With the unashamed directness of a press reporter, Brack focuses on the dancers’ official façade; unlike Degas whose affluent family was steeped in dance and music and for whom ballet was part of his accustomed milieu, Brack approached the dance floor as he did the racecourse, as an outside observer’.

Characteristically, Brack intended his ‘parable’ to work on several levels. Literally the ballroom scenes represent ‘modern life’. The characters and composition of The Old Time are based on a photograph of Jim and Margaret Ward, world professional old-time champions.⁶ Two competing couples hold the floor, with judges, spectators and other waiting dancers just visible in the shadows behind. Their intimate gestures are belied by the impersonality of the ritual; although there are undoubtedly sexual overtones in this and other works in the series. As Grishin remarks, ‘It is an attempt to record the actual appearance of the artificial, a reality too fantastic to imagine or to fabricate’. However, Brack’s carefully planned compositional structure, radically tilted perspective and scrupulously controlled painting technique together suggest another, underlying theme of precariousness and vulnerability. Ronald Millar explains: ‘None of the dancers can relax; swiveling and whirling on spikes over the sheen, manoeuvres pushed to a peak of hovering poise, each couple on is very own slipping perspective and in self-protective partnership… and each person both self-absorbed and dependent more than ever before on a partner. Husbands and wives drift together and apart, take off in individual transports yet maintain the contact’.⁷

Brack’s ballroom paintings were the first he completed after leaving his job at the Melbourne Gallery School to paint full-time and the series as a whole is a sustained tour de force the like of which he had never before been able to attempt. In 1970, some local critics found it hard to see past the subject matter – although the exhibitions at Rudy Komon Gallery in Sydney and Georges in Melbourne were extensively reviewed. (Donald Brook, for example, dismissed ballroom dancing as ‘untrendy’ and ‘not yet aesthetically upgraded by revival’).⁸ As Helen Brack has explained, contemporary commentators often saw his work as simply satirical or cruelly comic – but that was not his intention.⁹ Since that time, of course, Brack’s entirely self-sufficient, intellectual and unique vision of the world around him has been universally recognised and the ballroom paintings are among his most acclaimed works.

1. John Brack, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney and Georges Gallery, Melbourne, 1970, catalogue foreword.
2. Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pl. 19, see pp. 105, 225 note 3.
3. Op. cit., p. 106.
4. The Sun, Melbourne, 7 October 1970, p. 9.
5. Grishin, op. cit., p. 107.
6. Australasian Dancing Times, Souvenir Edition, October 1967, photograph by Maurice Strowbridge; reproduced in Grishin, op. cit., p. 110.
7. Millar, R., John Brack, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1971, p. 94.
8. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 April 1970, p. 12.
9. Essay on The Bar in Fine Australian Art, Sotheby’s, April 2006, p. 41.