Collins St., 5 pm is a 1955 painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts office workers walking along busy Collins Street in Melbourne after finishing work for the day"Blank-faced office workers hurry by like sleep-walkers, thinking only of the pubs or their homes in the suburbs". Brack conceived the work after reading T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land.Engberg, Juliana, "Collins Street, 5pm: John Brack's Enduring Cultural Icon', Art and Australia, vol. 34, no. 4, 1997, pp. 513-17. It is considered a companion piece to Brack's earlier work The Bar.
The painting was purchased from Peter Bray Gallery"In 1953, he had his first solo exhibition at Peter Bray's Gallery in Melbourne. Collins Street was exhibited at the same gallery in March 1956 and was immediately purchased by the NGV." McKiernan, M. (2010). 'John Brack Collins Street 5 pm, 1955'. Occupational Medicine, 60(2), 88-89. for the National Gallery of Victoria's permanent Australian art collection and is exhibited in the Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square in Melbourne.National Gallery of Victoria Acquisition 1956
In 2011, Collins St., 5 pm was voted the most popular work in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.
References
External links Collins St., 5pm - National Gallery of Victoria collection.