Year 1955 Artist John Brack | Medium oil on canvas Created 1955 | |
 | ||
Dimensions 114.6 cm × 162.9 cm (45.1 in × 64.1 in) Location National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Similar John Brack artwork, Other artwork | ||
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. Elliot's The Waste Land. It is considered a companion piece to Brack's earlier work, The Bar.
The painting was purchased from Peter Bray Gallery for the National Gallery of Victoria's permanent Australian art collection and is exhibited in the Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square in Melbourne.
Looking back on his iconic picture ... Brack found it to be “totally unsatisfactory”, because of the condescending attitude he adopted in relation to the people in the street. “I should have known,” he said, “that their lives were just as complex as mine, if not more so.”
In 2011, Collins St., 5 pm was voted the most popular work in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.