Recently I went to the wonderful John Brack exhibition at the NGV in Federation Square. I can highly recommend it (it's on until 9 August).
Writing in the Australian, Christopher Allen suggests that Brack's painting, including The Bar and Collins Street which are included here, suffered for a lack of empathy with their subjects. I never saw these famous and much loved paintings as lacking empathy; on the contrary, I thi nk The Bar empowers its female subject with a fabulous sense of superiority, and I think Collins Street implies a wonderful, somewhat distant other world that all of its subjects are thinking of, their real world, as they wait for their tram to transport them from the necessary daily drudgery of their work lives to the doubtlessly hollow evening home lives, but in their vacant faces I read a certain capitivation of thought and desire for their real, inner, private selves. Apparently, such a reading was not anticipated by Brack, who later regretted his patronising attitude to those subjects, seeing them as vacant and ignorant apparently, according to Allen. I guess it just goes to show that we all read something different out of art. I clearly am "wrong" in my reasing, not being an expert such as Allen. Then again, I do know what I like...
