Jack Bush and William Perehudoff are two good examples of artists who use this to their advantage. Odd dirty color can be a great foil against more brilliant color.

Good one, David. A real howler…

A new word is causing Karen Wilkin offense: “organize.” While sticking with “oafish” over “awkward” and “provincial” over “marginal,” let me nonetheless, if I may, replace “organize” with “facilitate”. I’m grateful to Karen in a way she might not actually have anticipated in thanking me for proofing the catalogue and offering installation hints during the Jack Bush exhibition in question. A receiving curator strives to be the servant of servants when working with an esteemed guest curator—and we all agreed, there’s no one one would rather turn to for a Jack Bush show than Karen Wilkin. If after months of visiting Toronto to explore various exhibition ideas with a particular collector, settling on Jack Bush, and inviting Karen to organize the show, I instilled in her the idea that the show was her own idea all along, then that really is the ideal way to make a guest curator feel. And if the works were procured from multiple sources, shipped across an international border, insured, photographed, printed, hung, discussed by a panel of young artists and reviewed in the press with the seeming inevitability with which a good meal is served in a restaurant – not to mention funded – then I did my job nicely. Only to spoil it all, years later, by using the word “organize” (in the same sentence in which the curator is acknowledged) instead of a humbler phrase like “helped set up”. Karen will know, however, that I’m a bull in a china shop. In 2000 she was a guest for dinner at my home and had to gently reprimand me for pouring wine from her wrong side. Clearly in her mind I’m a bit of, how shall we word this, an awkward marginal?

My memory regarding the ontology of the Studio School Bush exhibition is different, and somewhat borne out by Sarah Stanners reminiscences below.

David,

It’s difficult to think of the Jack Bush I knew as provincial. He was sophisticated — albeit unpretentious — well travelled, well read, just about as familiar with the New York art scene as his American peers and colleagues, and widely collected by major American and British collectors, and international museums. The assumption that anyone who responds to Bush’s work positively belongs to “the cult of Greenberg” is dated, inaccurate, and just plain silly. Of course, Greenberg-bashing still seems to be seen as a way of proving independence of thinking — cf Rob Storr’s catalogue piece on Al Held for Loretta Howard’s current exhibition.

The term “jolie laide” is a perfectly standard, rather old fashioned description of a female who wasn’t an acknowledged beauty. You’ll find it in Nancy Mitford. I’m not sure it carries over to painting in the way you seem to think it does. (Nor do I think it applies to Tom Nozkowski’s ravishing color and ravishing surfaces, but that’s another matter.)

As to your “organizing” the Bush works on paper show for the the New York Studio School, with respect, I take strenuous exception to your taking credit for the exhibition. You were running the school’s gallery then, but the show was my idea, my initiative, and my selection. I wrote the catalogue and installed the show. I recall you were immensely helpful when we were proofing the catalogue and trying to get the color to accurate, and you had some good ideas about the installation. But that’s not organizing.

Yours,

Karen

By the way, I pulled together a roundtable on Bush during the Studio School show I mention above, which featured Craig Fisher, Joe Fyfe, Jennifer Riley and Joan Waltemath with comments from the floor by Leah Durner and Stephen Westfall. It seems the tape recording of that event has fallen off the Studio School site but I shall fish around for it and see if it can’t be reinstated, there or here. It was a lively exchange of contemporary abstract painters who dig Bush.

The P word has really hit a raw spot with our friends north of the border, but it really was not meant to slight Canadians; precisely my point is that for a painter working in the formalist sixties and in contrast to New York’s Color Field mainstream Bush’s intentionally uningratiating style (rough textures, dusty palette) was a throwback to something more first generation AbEx in feel, and thereby likely to be perceived at the time as out of step with the latest developments. The O word is indeed a synonym of sorts for awkwardness (cackhanded is a word often used these days almost as praise but I’m squeamish about scatological terms) but with due respect I really didn’t need either a fear of Greenberg, who doesn’t own the word, or a thesaurus to want to come up with a more expressive term than awkwardness . While writing this reply, Sarah, I showed the original article to a colleague who shook her head in disbelief considering how “totally not negative” she thought the piece to be. But this woman is neither Canadian nor a member of the cult of Greenberg so is not automatically on the defensive about Bush. The essence of my point is Bush’s contemporary relevance: he could be hung happily with Stanley Whitney or Ron Gorchov, to name two artists currently on view in New York City that I admire. Or with Thomas Nozkowski. I was introduced to the term jolie laide by Montreal-born painter Allison Katz when looking at a Nozkowski show at Max Protetch Gallery many years ago. And I was lucky enough to see Nozkowski’s retrospective at your institution in 2009, Sarah. You suggest I return to Ottawa in 2014 to see your Bush retrospective, assuming that anyone who doesn’t appreciate Bush on your own terms must be ignorant of the work. Actually I organized a Jack Bush exhibition in New York City in 2009, guest curated by Karen Wilkin and reviewed here by Piri Halasz, and in preparation for that show spent enjoyable hours in the Toronto warehouse of one of the show’s lenders, a pretty good place to gauge the scope and quality of Bush’s work. But definitely, I have to see the retrospective. So please be so kind as to send me a plane ticket.