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John Brack / Australia 1920–99 / The sun lamps 1966 / Etching on wove paper / 32.7 x 39.6cm / Purchased 1967 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Helen Brack
John BrackThe sun lamps 1966
Not Currently on Display
The sun lamps is one of four etchings made by John Brack in 1966 of window displays showcasing surgical instruments and medical supplies in Swanston Street, Melbourne. These etchings relate to a series of paintings of shop windows that he had begun a few years earlier. Brack explained:
What struck me is they had window displays . . . as you would display ladies dresses . . . you would have these surgical instruments [displayed] in order to attract . . . the passerby . . . [who] might therefore be led to say, ‘I will buy one’ . . . that seemed to me a kind of irony and ambiguity that was worth painting.1
For the artist, this irony and ambiguity was a metaphor for the human condition. The sun lamps have a medical function, yet their design and arrangement suggest a nocturnal gathering of some sort of strange plant life. The work demonstrates that Brack was a highly skilled drafter; his use of line describes not only the form of the lamps and the wheelchairs in the background, but also the depth of the shop window and the play between light and dark.
Endnotes:
1 John Brack, quoted in Stephen Coppel, Out of Australia: Prints and Drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas [exhibition catalogue], British Museum Press, London, 2011, p.54.
John Brack is one of the most iconic Australian artists of the twentieth century. Brack took evening classes at the Victorian National Gallery School from 1938 to 1940, while he worked as an insurance clerk during the day. After serving in the army during World War Two, he continued his studies under William Dargie (1912–2003) in the late 1940s. For the next 20 years, Brack earned his living as an art teacher — as art master at Melbourne Grammar School and later as head of the National Gallery School (1962–68). Brack resigned from this position in 1968 in order to paint full-time.
One of the Antipodeans, Brack joined Charles Blackman (1928–2018), Arthur Boyd (1920–99) and others in defending modernist figurative art in the face of American Abstract Expressionism, a movement that was making waves in Australia in the 1950s. Brack sought inspiration in Melbourne, his paintings serving as social commentary on urban and suburban life, earning him a reputation for sardonic, yet sympathetic, insights into the human condition. The monochromatic colour schemes and hard lines dominating Brack’s painting reinforce a preoccupation with the isolating and alienating aspects of modern life.