John Brack

Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Greg Korn, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, purchased from the above in 1988-9

Robert Lindsay, et al.,John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 134
Sasha Grishin, The Art of John Brack, Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, cat. p283, p. 72

Two versions of Triumphal March, 1981, in oil and in watercolour, were shown in John Brack's 1983 solo exhibition at the Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, the oil painting being considered significant enough to be reproduced in the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition itself was a triumph, gaining much critical acclaim. In The Australian, Robert Rooney referred to Brack as 'the person most likely to succeed the late Fred Williams as the foremost artist of his generation'. Memory Holloway, art critic for The Age, described Brack as 'undeniably one of Australia's most formidable living artists'; and she considered the exhibition's major painting, Battle, 'one of the most important pictures painted in Australia over the past five years'. ¹ It was in good company with other battle paintings such as Uccello's Rout, 1981, and We, Us Them, 1983 in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. The oil paintings were exhibited together with their watercolour drawings – so complete that they cannot be called studies.

Brack drew on influences as diverse as his wartime experiences, old soldiers' recollections of battles played out across the dinner table, and of battles in paint by the Renaissance Florentine, Paolo Uccello and the eighteenth-century Frenchman, Jacques-Louis David. 'The pencils and their pens', wrote Sasha Grishin, 'stand as metaphors as much for soldiers and their commanders as for office workers and their chiefs, or any other grouping'. ²  Triumphal March includes all the classic Brack images and metaphors, multi-layered in meaning – the tilted tabletop and floorboards  – of precarious instability, illusions within illusions, tensions, the artist utterly detached. Or is he? The irony is palpable, with play on words and meaning. The arch of triumph lies behind the marching pens and pencils. It is but an image recorded on paper, for fame, like all things, is transitory.

1. Rooney, R., 'Brack solidifies place among leaders of cool', The Australian,  1 June 1983, p. 7; Holloway, M., 'Intelligence dominates the romantic and the emotional', The Age,  25 May 1983, p. 14.
2. Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, p. 146.