Jack Bush, Roberts Gallery, Toronto, 1952, no. 17
Miriam Shiell Fine Art, Toronto, Spring 2014
Literature
Terry Fenton, Jack Bush: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1976, unpaginated
Christine Boyanoski, Jack Bush: Early Work, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1986, pages 22-23
Dennis Reid, “Jack Bush: The Development of a Canadian Painter”, in Karen Wilkin (ed.), Jack Bush, Toronto, 1984, pages 18-19
Conscious of their relative isolation from major centres of artistic production and emboldened by the activities of their American contemporaries in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jack Bush and a generation of emerging Canadian abstract painters looked stateside, turning to New York for creative fuel and finding no shortage of inspiration there. Travelling for the first time to the city in 1950 as a member of the Toronto chapter of the Art Director’s Club, Bush eagerly synthesized the insights he gleaned from his exposure to canonical works of American and European art. Reminiscing on these formative experiences in 1976, Bush recalled how this initial trip to New York became a yearly tradition, one that influenced his representational painting “to such an extent” that the artist “started painting canvases that were semi-abstract, [though] still with the figure or landscape.” Several of the resulting works from this productive period of 1950 to 1951 were included in exhibitions at the Roberts Gallery in Toronto (Jack Bush) and Adelaide House in Oshawa (Canadian Abstraction Exhibition). Well-received by the press and considered “very successful” by the artist himself, the 1952 exhibitions showcased Bush’s efforts to arrive at a unique visual language that could act as vehicle for both his formal experimentations and his desire for emotional expression.
Though recognizable as reclining human figures in an idyllic landscape, the male and female forms of “Summer Afternoon/The Lovers” are fragmented, their entwined limbs approaching abstraction in this depiction of a passionate embrace. Still working with heavy applications of paint‒Bush would not begin thinning his pigments until later in the 1950s–the artist was beginning to isolate and geometricize shapes within his compositions, often employing a network of assertive black outlines to distinguish his subject matter. As Dennis Reid has written of Bush’s works from this era, “form is simplified,” and colour “functions independently of the forms” to convey pure emotion. Flat planes of rich complementary colours applied with vigorous diagonal brushstrokes serve dual purpose here, lending compositional balance to the active surface of the painting and heightening the psychic intensity of the scene, particularly in the red pigment between the lovers’ faces, and in the variegated hues of the lush bramble that conceals their encounter. “Summer Afternoon/The Lovers” belongs to a body of work which constitutes the artist’s shift from a tentative acknowledgement of trends in American and European modernism toward the expression of a visual idiom of his own, one he would continue to develop in earnest after officially aligning with the Painters Eleven in 1953. Conscious of the possibilities of international aesthetic developments, the artist nevertheless acknowledges his roots: the red canoe and sun-drenched rock cut in the distance situate Bush’s “dejeuner sur l’herbe” within a welcoming and decidedly Canadian pictorial tradition.
The preceding essay was written by Consignor Canadian Fine Art specialists.
“Summer Afternoon/The Lovers” will be included in the forthcoming “Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné”. We thank Dr. Sarah Stanners for providing cataloguing details related to the artwork.
