Artwork by Jack Hamilton Bush,  Summer Lake

Jack Bush
Summer Lake

acrylic on canvas
signed “Jack Bush - Toronto”, titled and dated January 1973 on the reverse
49.75 x 68.25 ins ( 126.4 x 173.4 cms )

Auction Estimate: $150,000.00$100,000.00 - $150,000.00

Price Realized $310,500.00
Sale date: May 29th 2014

Provenance:
André Emmerich, March 1973.
Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton.
The Collection of Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc.
Exhibited:
Andre Emmerich Gallery, “Jack Bush: Neue Bilder”, Zurich, Switzerland, March 30 - April 27, 1974.
Literature:
Iris Nowell, “Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones of Canadian Art”, Vancouver/Toronto, 2010, page 36.
John Mclean, “Jack Bush: Recent Paintings”, “Studio International”, Volume 188, Issue 968, July - August 1974, pages 27-29, reproduced page 29.
On an evening in 1965, Bush received a telephone call from gallerist André Emmerich who had just met with Clement Greenberg. “I would like you to come to my gallery” prompted Emmerich, “I think your work deserves it, and I'm proposing to offer you a show February 12th [1966]. Clem says that you have the canvases and that they are really good.” This was the beginning of a critical relationship for Bush with Emmerich, who would hold frequent exhibitions of Bush's artwork in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in his New York and Zurich galleries. “Summer Lake” was shown in one such exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery, Zurich, in the spring of 1974.

In “Summer Lake”, the blue pigment, which is pulled across the surface of the canvas, creates a delicate yet dramatic and variegated ground for his thoughtful arrangement of form and colour. This open ground, formed methodically by painting in a single direction, interacts strongly with the vibrant-coloured bars applied with assertive sweeps. Bush finds his motif in nature, the very title of the work suggesting an iridescent blue body of water captured on a hot summer day. He retains something of the feel of nature, but produces an entirely abstract work full of tension and vigour. “Summer Lake” is an iconic example of the artist's lyrical arrangement of bold-hued shapes against a wonderfully complex ground.

Artist markings on the reverse indicate that the artwork can be displayed vertically or horizontally. “Summer Lake” was presented vertically at the 1974 exhibition in Zurich.

“Summer Lake” will be included in the forthcoming “Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné”. We thank Dr. Sarah Stanners for her assistance in the cataloguing of this painting. Sarah is co-curating a Jack Bush retrospective exhibition to be held at the National Gallery of Canada which is scheduled for November 2014 through February 2015.


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Jack Hamilton Bush
(1909 - 1977) Painters Eleven, OSA, ARCA

A founding member of the Painters Eleven group and the subject of major retrospectives at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1976) and the National Gallery of Canada (2014), Jack Bush (born March 20, 1909 in Toronto; died January 24, 1977 in Toronto) was one of Canada’s most influential artists. Among the first Canadian painters of his generation to achieve international success in his lifetime, Bush was a masterful draftsman and colourist whose works are coveted by major institutions and private collectors throughout the world. Born in the Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto in 1909, Bush spent his childhood in London, Ontario, and Montréal, Québec, where he studied at the Royal Canadian Academy and apprenticed as a commercial artist in his father’s business, Rapid Electro Type Company. After relocating in 1928 to work in the firm’s Toronto offices, his interest in fine art grew through contact with members of the Group of Seven, the Ontario Society of Artists, and the Canadian Group of Painters. Working as a commercial artist by day, Bush painted and took night classes at the Ontario College of Art (now the Ontario College of Art and Design University) throughout the 1930s, studying under Frederick Challener, John Alfsen, George Pepper, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Charles Comfort. After forming the commercial design firm Wookey, Bush and Winter in 1942 with partners Leslie Wookey and William Winter, Bush remained engaged in the graphic art world until his retirement in 1968.

Like many of his contemporaries in Toronto, Bush had little exposure to international trends of modernism during his formative years as a painter. For nearly two decades, he drew inspiration for his landscape and figural paintings from works by members of the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian Group of Painters. Though he began to incorporate non-representational elements in his work in the late 1940s, Bush’s more focused experimentations with formal abstraction in the early 1950s reveal the conspicuous influence of his eventual encounters with modern artwork in Toronto and New York City. In 1953, Bush joined the newly-founded Toronto artist group Painters Eleven. Through his involvement in the group’s efforts to promote abstract painting in Canada, Bush met the influential New York City art critic Clement Greenberg. Their resulting friendship would influence Bush’s early development as an abstract painter, with Greenberg serving as an occasional mentor to the artist, encouraging him to abandon his Abstract Expressionist style in favour of a brighter, more refined palette and technique. Through his association with Painters Eleven, Bush became closely tied to Colour Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction—two movements that had evolved from Abstract Expressionism. After the group disbanded in 1959, Bush’s distinguished career was marked by numerous achievements, including the opportunity to represent Canada at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1967, after which his art found considerable commercial success in the United States (Bush had already been showing his work in New York City since 1962). In 1963, Hugo McPherson in his review of Bush’s showing at the Gallery Moos, Toronto, linked Bush with Matisse as follows, “...he reminds us of the classical joy and simplicity of the later Matisse. This is his richest vein. His comments on France, Italy, and Spain, and his observations titled ‘Red on Pink’ and ‘Growing Plant’ are at once spare and bright and probing.”

In 1972, Bush was the subject of the inaugural survey exhibition in the modern wing of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Four years later, the Art Gallery of Ontario organized a major touring retrospective of his work. Bush as a member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, 1942 (former President); Ontario Society of Artists (former Vice-President) 1943; Associate Royal Canadian Academician, 1946; Canadian Group of Painters’, 1948, and the Art Directors’ Club of Toronto. In 2014, the National Gallery of Canada hosted a major retrospective exhibition of Jack Bush’s work. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné of Bush’s work is set to be released in the coming years.

Jack Bush died at the age of 68 in 1977, one year after he received the honour of Officer of the Order of Canada.