John Brack

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Collection of Raymond and Diana Kidd; purchased from the above in December 1971

Paintings and Drawings by John Brack, Peter Bray Gallery , Melbourne, 27 October - 5 November, 1953, cat. 3
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, August 1953, cat. 3
John Brack, a Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, December 1987, cat. 11 (label on reverse)
A Private Collection, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 1992, cat. 25

Sasha Grishin, The Art of John Brack: Catalogue Raisonné (2 vols.), Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, illus. pl. 21, p. 87, vol I, p. 40
Robert Lindsay et al., John Brack: a Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 14, 16, illus. pl. 11, p. 30

This work is in good stable original condition. The work is presented in its original light brown timber frame. The work is its original stretcher and not laid down. There are no signs of re-touching under ultra violet inspection. The work would benefit from a light surface clean, there are a few minor areas of fly spotting across the surface and some areas of mildew through the lower quadrant of the painting in the areas of brown paint. There are some fine areas of cracking in the chair in the lower right.
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John Brack held his first solo exhibition at the Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne in October- November 1953. The show has come to be regarded as something of a landmark, not only in terms of the artist's career, but in terms of Melbourne's (and Australia's) art history. Many of the fifteen works included in that exhibition are now recognised as late modernist icons – ten were included in the National Gallery of Victoria's Brack retrospective in 1987; two are held in public collections.¹

At the time of the exhibition, however, Melbourne's reviewers were divided in their interpretation of the motivation of the artist and the value of the work. Alan Warren in The Sun compared Brack's figures of retailers and small businessmen, young home-makers and suburban streets, jockeys and footballers with 'Charles Blackman's humorous schoolgirls', suggesting that both artists were 'confusing painting ideals with those of cartooning'² The Age critic took a similar position, describing the exhibition as 'the work of an artist with an eye for a ludicrous situation',  and one which 'falls into the category of caricature and illustration.'³

Arnold Shore in The Argus took a more nuanced view, describing the work as 'today, as we can see today, painted by an artist', and exhorting his readers: 'do not miss the art value that goes hand in hand with each.'⁴ In a lengthy, perceptive and enthusiastic piece, The Herald's Alan McCulloch explained further:

'At first the neat and systematic sewing up of local types would seem to indicate here that the aim is satirical – certainly there is irony and humour in it – but this first impression is misleading. Behind the observation of the merely physical is a poetic intention which saves the work from incidental references, and places it in an entirely different category to that of, say the newspaper cartoon. The cruelty of the satirist... is curiously offset by a subtle humanism, developed probably through the artist's ability to establish a strong personal link with his subject.'⁵

The young John Brack's apparent humanism is nevertheless occasionally shadowed by a mood of tragedy, threat or isolation. In the late 1940s, while studying at the National Gallery School, Brack had read a great deal of French existentialism, particularly the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The fierce honesty and moral challenge of Sartre's novels and philosophy found a visual analogue in the work of a number of post-war painters: members of the French 'L'Homme Témoin' ('Witness') group such as Michel de Gallard, André Minaux and Bernard Buffet, for example; or the Englishman William Scott, with his rationing-minimalist tabletop still lifes. In his early work, Brack adopted these artists' flat,linear, reductive style and their tendency clearly to separate and isolate from one another a composition's various figures or motifs.

The present work certainly expresses a strong sense of existential isolation. The oddly antinaturalistic, perspectiveless setting, with its rectangles of table, window, doorway and chair, forms an abstract cage within which Brack presents 'a human story, summarised and brought to climax... with all the suspense of a stage play.'⁶

The title and subject are taken from the parable of the Prodigal Son. In Luke's Gospel (15: 11-32), Jesus tells the story of a man who has two sons.  The younger demands his share of the family property and leaves home, quickly dissipating his inheritance in wild living. Broke and starving, the young man eventually slinks home with his tail between his legs, only to be greeted with unreserved joy by his father, who kills a fatted calf to celebrate his return.  But there is little sense of joyous reunion here. There is no laughter, with the mouths of the three main figures set in tight horizontal grimaces. Instead of the fatted calf of the biblical story, there is only a frugal kitchen supper. Indeed, there is something vaguely disturbing about this domestic scene: in the bald, haggard, skull-like head of the father⁷ and in the mother aproned like a butcher, her hand clutching a longbladed knife. At the upper right, seen through a half-door or perhaps reflected in a mirror is the shadowy silhouette of the Prodigal's obedient but discontented, envious younger brother - a figure very similar to the viewer- artist's reflection in the mirror of Men's Wear (1953, National Gallery of Australia), or in the later shop-window paintings. According to the present owners, Brack stated during a visit that 'the painting represented his feelings and experiences on his return from six years' active war service, in that '"everything was just the same."'⁸

The critic Ronald Millar once described Brack as 'a deliberator, a distiller, a subtractor rather than a piler-on of visual goodies.'⁹ This refined, minimal aesthetic finds early expression in The Return of the Prodigal Son. Bleak, airless and emotionally strangled, this painting is one of Brack's early masterpieces, and a powerful statement of suburban alienation in post-war Melbourne.

1. Works from the 1953 show included in the NGV exhibition were Men's Wear, The New House, The Return of the Prodigal Son, The Jockey and his Wife, The Tram, Mr Whitaker's Small Business, Three of the Players, Three Women, Man in a Pub and The Staircase. Men's Wear is owned by the National Gallery of Australia; The Short Street by the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
2. Alan Warren, 'Pleasing flower art by grandmother', The Sun, 27 October 1953, p. 16
3. 'Heavy demands on the modern artist', The Age, 27 October 1953, p. 2
4. Arnold Shore, 'We can all enjoy art like this', The Argus, 28 October 1953, p. 4
5. Alan McCulloch, 'The little man in paint', The Herald, 27 October 1953, p. 10
6. McCulloch, op. cit.
7. The artist may have taken inspiration from a particularly striking illustration in The Studio the previous year (vol. 143 no. 706, January 1952, p. 21), featuring a profile of a bald-headed monk from a 17th century Neapolitan painting.
8. pers. comm., 2008
9. Ronald Millar, John Brack, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, p. 16