John Brack

Australian and European Paintings, Christie's, Melbourne, 20 August 1996, lot 37
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

John Brack, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 26 April - 13 May 1960, cat. 4
The Winter Collectors' Exhibition: Important paintings and works on paper, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne, 8 - 25 August 2007, cat. 7

Sasha Grishin, The Art of John Brack, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990, vol. I, p. 83 - 4, vol. II, p. 15 (cat. 105)
Robert Lindsay, John Brack: a retrospective exhibition, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1987, p. 121

This work is framed in a brown stained frame with a black rebate. Work is in good original condition.
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This rare and unusual painting is an important work from a crucial period of John Brack's work.

Around 1960-1961 the artist made a short, sweet detour away from his established mode of spiky, graphic social-satirical figuration. Possibly under the influence of overseas models¹  and possibly in direct, perverse reaction to the overwrought polemics of Bernard Smith's Antipodean Manifesto,² Brack started to explore the 'unfamiliar territory of abstraction, texture and colour.'³  He began distorting his bodies and faces and thickening his surface in works such as Eating cake and Two fighting boys (both 1960, National Gallery of Australia), refining the process in the biomorphic Bride and musical series. Concurrently, and in dialectical opposition to these unflattering close-ups, he also essayed a series of long shots, aerial views of residential suburbs in which the rooflines, back gardens, nature strips and street trees of Surrey Hills and Burwood were abstracted into flat, cartographic patterns of brown and gold. The present work is one of this latter group, which when first exhibited in Brisbane in 1960 prompted Gertrude Langer to remark that Brack had 'moved now towards almost total abstraction.'⁴

'Almost' is the key word. Despite its Paul Klee-like pattern and Jean Dubuffet-like textures, the present work remains squint-legible as a realistic view of eastern suburban Melbourne. As such it is not merely a decorative pattern painting, however handsome, but has the same social-argumentative power as Brack's paintings of the 1950s. The year it was painted architect Robin Boyd published The Australian ugliness; Brack's Surrey Hills can be seen as a contribution to the contemporary debate about the design of Australia's cities. It is a study 'not so much in the cult of conspicuous ugliness as in the incongruity of the elements – the mass urban squalor, the imposed pattern and standardisation that destroys individuality and reduces all to an ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle.'⁵

1. The Tate Gallery exhibition The new American abstraction had introduced action painting to the British cultural imperium in February 1959, and the National Gallery of Victoria mounted a British Abstraction show in May the same year
2. Bernard Smith, The Antipodean Manifesto: essays in art and history, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 165 - 167. Brack had in fact participated in the famous August 1959 exhibition, with his Schoolyard series.
3. Robert Lindsay, John Brack: a retrospective exhibition, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1987, p. 18
4. Gertrude Langer, 'A painter with a taste for satire', Courier-Mail, 26 April 1960, p. 2. There is a delicious irony in Brack's flirtation with the non-objective being expressed through such subjects. In a 1953 lecture, he had described abstract painting's 'vast welter of coloured cliches' spreading 'all over the world ... like suburban villas.' (quoted in Chris McAuliffe, 'A pilgrimage to nowhere in particular: John Brack's suburban motif of the 1950s', in Kirsty Grant (ed.), John Brack, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, p. 145)
5. Sasha Grishin, The art of John Brack, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990, vol I p. 84