Collins St, 5p.m.
1955
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 114.8 × 162.8 cm
- Place/s of Execution
- Melbourne, Victoria
- Inscription
- inscribed in black paint l.l.: John Brack 55
inscribed in white chalk (vertically) on reverse: BRACK / COLLINS ST.
inscribed in pencil (vertically) on reverse: Collins St J. BRACK - Accession Number
- 3302-4
- Department
- Australian Painting
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1956
© National Gallery of Victoria
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of The Vizard Foundation - Gallery location
- Gallery 12
Level 2, NGV Australia - About this work
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In the early 1950s, John Brack adopted the urban Melbourne environment as his subject, recording the shops, bars and workplaces of the city with an ironic edge. This painting is among the most iconic of this period. Here, Brack depicts Melbourne’s financial centre hub at the end of the working day, uniformly dressed office-workers stream homeward. Inspired by his own experience employed by a city-based insurance company, Brack points to the enduring presence of the individual by personalising each figure, despite the formal repetition and universally muted palette enchancing the over-arching sense of drudgery of nine-to-five office life.
- Subjects (general)
- Cityscapes Human Figures
- Subjects (specific)
- Australia (nation) cities footpaths Melbourne (inhabited place) pedestrians street scenes Victoria (state) white collar workers
Frame
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The frame for John Brack’s Collins St. 5pm is contemporary with the work. The painting came into the collection in 1956, the year after it was painted and the frame is the one on the work at the time of acquisition. It is a simple bevelled profile, carrying a light wash of pale colour, and appears on a number of the artist's works from the mid 1950’s.
A copy of this frame was made for The bar, 1954 (2009.53). A similar frame profile was used for, The block, 1954 (1999.197) and Self portrait, 1955, (2000.185).The painting was cleaned in 2011.
- Framemaker
- Unknown - 20th century
- Date
- c.1955
- Materials
-
bevelled timber section