Summer Gone, 1976

Collection of the artist (August - September 1976) Estate of Jack Bush Waddington Galleries Barbara Divver Fine Art, New York (January 1981) The Charles and Marcia McCrae Family Collection, Pennsylvania Private Collection, by descent, Reading, Pennsylvania Freeman’s auction, Philadelphia, May 8, 2018, lot 37 Private Collection, Toronto Canadian Fine Arts, Toronto Private Collection, Toronto

According to the artist’s records, “Summer Gone” is the first triangle- shaped canvas of 1976 and the first in a run of shaped canvases dating to August 1976, including “Blue Partita and Green Partita”, which are diamond-shaped, and “Yellow Partita”, which is shaped like an isosceles triangle with two sides of equal length. Summer Gone is an irregular triangle with different lengths on all three sides: 62.5 x 51.25 x 34.25 inches (158.8 x 130.2 x 87 cm). There is a total of four triangle paintings in the artist’s oeuvre and “Summer Gone” is the only irregularly shaped triangle painting. The first two triangle-shaped paintings by the artist were made in April 1966. First, “Mabel’s Release #2” (now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), and second, “Spring Triangle” (now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario; see final selection within available images). One of the pioneers of the shaped canvas is Frank Stella, who Bush knew from his associations with American Color Field artists and the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto. Bush was particularly impressed by the linear placement of colour and inventiveness of Stella’s “Irregular Polygon series” (1965-66). For Stella, as well as Bush, a shaped canvas liberated the painter from the confines of the traditional picture plane. Rather than being presented with a space for the illusion of objects, a shaped canvas becomes an object itself. In the 1970s, Bush began to leave space around the far edges of his painted picture space. Sometimes, as with “Summer Gone”, he applied a light brown wash (diluted acrylic paint) to this border that separates the ground paint from the canvas edge. Pencil lines can be seen at the edge of the sponged-on background, which helped the artist to mind this purposeful gap when he painted his canvases unframed, tacked to a false wall in his studio. His pencil lines also reveal the fact that he was following a predetermined plan, not just working with a random piece of canvas. With a 41-year-long career as a commercial artist specializing in illustration, Bush never did shake his habits as a careful draughtsman. As the title suggests, “Summer Gone” was painted in August. The summer of 1976 was the artist’s last summer. Bush died of a heart attack in January 1977, at the age of sixty-seven. While Bush left no clue as to the exact source of his title – and it may simply be a sentimental end of season thought – there is a song called “Summer’s Gone” by Paul Anka, released in 1960, which feels apt: Summer’s gone and no songbirds are singing Because you’re gone, gone from my arms Gone from my lips but you’re still in my heart This painting will be included in Dr. Sarah Stanners’ forthcoming “Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné”. We extend our thanks to Dr. Sarah Stanners for contributing the preceding essay. Sarah is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Art History while writing the forthcoming “Jack Bush Catalogue Raisonné”. From 2015 to 2018 she was the Chief Curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Co-Curator of the 2014/2015 national travelling exhibition, Jack Bush, Co-Author of the resulting 2014 exhibition catalogue (”Jack Bush”) and guest curator and author for “Jack Bush: In Studio”, organized by the Esker Foundation in Calgary.