Jack Bush

Jack Bush is one of Canada’s most influential colour field painters and a key figure in Post Painterly Abstraction. A contemporary of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, he was among the first Canadian artists of his generation to gain international recognition; Clement Greenberg praised him as a “supreme colorist.” Born in Toronto in 1909, Bush grew up in Montreal and entered commercial art in his father’s firm, Rapid Electro Type Company. While working by day, he trained with Adam Sheriff Scott and Edmond Dyonnet at the Art Association of Montreal and later took night classes at the Ontario College of Art with teachers including Charles Comfort and J. W. Beatty. In 1953 he co-founded the Toronto collective Painters Eleven. A pivotal meeting with critic Clement Greenberg in 1957 sharpened Bush’s move from gestural abstraction toward high key colour, stained grounds, and simplified forms; the group’s international profile rose with the 1956 presentation with the American Abstract Artists at the Riverside Museum in New York. He switched from oil to water-based acrylic in 1966 for health reasons, a change that brightened the palette and flattened the surface. Bush’s rise paralleled increasing exposure in the United States and Europe. He held his first New York solo at Robert Elkon Gallery in 1962, joined André Emmerich Gallery mid-decade, and was included in Greenberg’s landmark exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction at LACMA in 1964 which travelled to Minneapolis and Toronto. In 1967 he represented Canada at the São Paulo Bienal; by 1968 he left advertising, after forty-two years, to paint full time. A solo at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1972, an AGO retrospective in 1976, and the National Gallery of Canada retrospective in 2014 to 2015 cemented his legacy. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1976. Within the studio, Bush worked in distinctive series that clarified his late language, including thrust and sash motifs of the early nineteen sixties and renewed colour column constructions in the mid nineteen seventies. Works such as Blue Studio and Striped Column at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, illustrate his turn from oil to acrylic and his emphasis on radiant colour and floating form. Bush’s practice is documented in extensive diaries from 1952 to 1976 and record books held at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The four volume Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné by Dr Sarah Stanners, published in September 2024 by David Mirvish Books with Coach House Press, offers the definitive account of more than 1,800 paintings. Today his work is held by major institutions including the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.