This 290-page, splendidly illustrated catalogue accompanies the major Jack Bush retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, on view through February 22. With 124 paintings, numerous drawings and preparatory sketches, some of his commercial work, and even a few of his notebooks, this exhibition marks a major commitment to the abstract painter. There are essays by the Gallery’s director, Marc Mayer; guest curator Sarah Stanners; National Gallery curator Adam Welch and Karen Wilkin. Much new information is presented, drawn from Bush’s diaries now held by the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Bush re-invented himself so often as an artist that his stylistic diversity can challenge even the most sophisticated viewer, a fact reflected in the extraordinary diversity of the National Gallery exhibition. Bush began around 1930 as a landscape painter in the tradition of Canada’s Group of Seven and by the 1950s shared the interest of the Toronto-based abstract expressionist-leaning group, Painters Eleven. Even in the period of his artistic maturity, however, which I would argue began in 1961 – surprisingly late for an artist born in 1909 and three years older than Jackson Pollock – Bush was remarkably eclectic in terms of style.

Both Mayer and Welch put to rest the canard that Bush was “an aesthetic marionette” unduly under the influence of Clement Greenberg. They recount in detail Bush’s “aesthetic resistance” to the powerful New York critic. Bush may have changed his paint handling, centered the image less, and eventually focused on his strength as a great colourist by abandoning black, all at the suggestion of Greenberg, but the intelligence and inventiveness of the art was Bush’s alone. This view of Bush’s independent mindedness, despite his openness to criticism, is in accord with my own experience. In 1975 Bush recounted to me an encouraging visit to his studio by Greenberg and American critic/curator Kenworth Moffett: “they said I was on a roll and the success ratio was very high, but many of the pictures were upside down” from their best possible orientation. Was he going to turn them the suggested 180 degrees? “No.” And why not? “Because they’re wrong.”

Wilkin makes a persuasive argument that Bush occupies a unique position within color field painting. His work is distinguished by a deceptive awkwardness, an “irrepressible personality,” and a vocabulary of both colour and forms “rooted in observed actuality.” Indeed, Bush could be classified as what I call an “image-bank” painter. His work stands in striking contrast to the resolutely non-referential and seemingly more precise and refined art of his American counterparts. An American who lived in Canada for many years, Wilkin chooses not to locate Bush’s fecund artistic compromises within a national psyche shaped by continual tensions between the different language communities. Just as Tchaikovsky confronted Russian nationalist composers of ”The Five” (Mussorgsky, Borodin et al.) with his assertion that “I am Russian and so my music is Russian,” so Bush is a distinctly Canadian painter, the objections of ardent Canadian nationalists like Barry Lord notwithstanding. His ambition to be true to himself and his own experience living with his family in Toronto, while taking advantage of all that international high modernism offered, is one of many reasons why he accomplished so much.

Marc Mayer gives some helpful clues about the features that define Bush’s artistic personality, which he sees as “playful, searching and mischievous” – a notable accomplishment given the “anguish” of both the man and the art ca. 1945-47. Moreover, Stanners notes numerous occasions when Bush expresses “fear” and “anxiety” in his efforts to assimilate the accomplishments of New York and insert himself as a respected figure in that milieu, and Wilkin identifies a number of paintings that draw upon Bush’s disquieting problems with his health: angina and cirrhosis in particular. Undoubtedly the candour of Bush’s art was fostered by his long relationship with psychiatrist Dr. J. Allan Walters, who, as is known from Bush’s diaries, suggested in 1947 that Bush “paint freely the inner feeling + moods.”

How, then, can we reconcile Mayer’s assessment with such compelling biographical information? One wonders, can a profound artistic personality ever be so exclusively positive in emotional valence? Perhaps the best art is always a palimpsest, with layers of feeling, from the most manifest to the deepest. Wilkin suggests that Bush “comforted himself at a frightening moment, by transforming his experience… into an abstract language of luminous hues and evocative shapes that transcended their origins.” But she does not choose to identify this intra-psychic process as aesthetic distance, the phenomenon that was of such interest to Hegel, Pater and Croce, and which Edward Bullough argued in 1912 was central to all art. Aesthetic distance is arguably the litmus test for quality in many of Bush’s paintings. A distinctly image-bound work like Test (1969), which so clearly replicates the main features of Bush’s electrocardiogram and adds aggressive crescent shapes to stand for his pain from angina attacks, is surely too close to Bush’s distress to be among his best works. Cirr (1974), which replicates much of a doctor’ drawing of Bush’s diseased liver, is an even clearer instance of insufficient aesthetic distance. I much prefer works like the magnificent Rising (1970), in which the crescent shape has lost any manifest aura of menace, despite its origins. Such a work has its aesthetic distance and yet stands back from over-distancing.

As I see it, Bush’s paintings enable anyone with sufficient empathy to share the most profound struggles and emotions of a great artist. I am moved by the humanity of his art more than I am by greater aesthetic distance – the apollonian calm and reserve – of Kenneth Noland or Ellsworth Kelly, and I find him no less rewarding than such great colorists as Morris Louis and Jules Olitski. The range and depth of feeling conveyed by the best of his work convinces me that he is one of the paramount artists of his time.

Jack Bush, by Marc Mayer, Sarah Stanners, Adam Welch and Karen Wilkin. National Gallery of Canada. Exhibition catalogue. 300 pages. ISBN: 978-0888849250. Also available in French edition. $45 (Canadian).

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The paintings of Jack Bush were once described by Hilton Kramer as “a garden for the eye,” an apt analogy for images that balance chromatic vibrancy and earthiness.  Canada’s participant in Color Field Painting held an obstinate remove from either the geometric hard edges or the ethereal sprays and stains of his confreres south of the border.  His paintings impact the retina with a dull thud. Color is intense but somehow un-ingratiating, as if mixed with soot and chalk.  The oafishness of his shapes and strokes and the uneasy back and forth between painterliness and pictoriality – foreground gesture and background expanse – make him provincial for the period in which he worked and uncannily relevant for the present.  Sing Sing Sing (1974) arrays a fluttering string of rough-torn ribbons – an anti-spectrum of anonymous color samples – against an agitated, nauseatingly meat-like, marbled ground. Beauty and the Beast.

Jack Bush: New York Visit at FreedmanArt, 25 East 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues, (212) 249-2040, February 18 to April 28, 2012.

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This modest but sparkling exhibition of one largish watercolor and 21 medium-sized gouaches is by Jack Bush (1909-1977), regarded by some (including myself) as Canada’s most outstanding painter. True, those who know his large paintings on canvas, exhibited in New York from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, may find this exhibition only a hint of what he could achieve. Still, we haven’t had a Bush exhibition of any kind in the Big Apple since 1997 (and even that was only of early work), so for the present generation of gallery-goers, this show should serve as a welcome introduction.

Bush (like Morris Louis) was a near-contemporary of Pollock’s, but didn’t begin  to create the paintings upon which his reputation really rests until after Pollock’s death.  A lifelong resident of Toronto, Bush attended traditional art schools there in the ‘20s and ‘30s, supporting himself and his family as a commercial artist while exhibiting representational paintings until the late ‘40s. In the ‘50s, he evolved into abstraction, initially taking his cues from the heavily-brushed, gestural style favored by de Kooning and so popular in New York during that decade.  Then, in 1957, Clement Greenberg visited Toronto, at the invitation of the Painters Eleven, a local artists’ group to which Bush belonged.  Even in those days, Greenberg was controversial: two of the eleven refused to let him in their studios, but Bush was among the nine who did.  Greenberg was unimpressed with Bush’s gestural work, but very impressed with some watercolors that the artist had made and laid aside—so impressed, in fact, that he suggested Bush apply this thinner watercolor technique to his larger work on canvas.  Bush took this advice as a point of departure, and revolutionized his style.  In a sense, then, the present exhibition thus becomes a primer on the foundation of Bush’s later accomplishments, and shows what Greenberg admired about this artist first.

The exhibition, curated by Karen Wilkin, and hung in a blessedly chronological sequence, displays work from the ‘60s in the first, entry gallery, and from the early ‘70s in the second, back gallery.  This is the right way to show them, for viewers meeting Bush for the first time will probably find the ‘60s work most accessible, composed as it is of bright, cheerful colors and simple, almost bouncy figures mostly on grounds of white—in other words, not unlike much other color-field painting of the ‘60s, or all that different from what Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Friedel Dzubas were doing at the time. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of dynamic, satisfying images here, especially the brilliant trio of “sash” paintings directly across from the entrance, Nice Pink, (1965), Bitter Pink, (1965) andUntitled (1966).  According to Wilkin’s catalogue esssay, this image of a stack of colored blocks was inspired, during a visit to New York, by a Madison Avenue shop window display of a woman’s shirt and voluminous skirt, cinched with a wide belt.  As this is a true abstraction, however, and results count for more than intentions, the image also suggests a necktie, tree, skyscraper, and numerous other associations—as well as packing a punch not to be explained by any associations at all.

The second gallery is the one that may challenge the viewer’s taste, for by the ‘70s, Bush had found his mature style, moving into a realm in which he had no artistic kin. In other words, these images are a lot less familiar, and familiarity is — in art as in human relations — sometimes necessary to breed content (accent on the second syllable).  Instead of a white field, all but one of the gouaches in this gallery present their figures on a colored ground, mostly a matte but sometimes a mottled gray (in one case, a softer brown).  The figures themselves aren’t simple geometric ones, but with subtle touches that I can’t recall having seen elsewhere — smooth, opaque streaks or bars of color with one end blunt and the other ragged, as though a giant brush had swept them with a single stroke. And giant loops or squiggles, also creating the illusion that a giant brush has been at work.  Again, the wall of the gallery directly across from the entry offers the most dramatic display of this idiom, with three beautifully simple yet elegant images on gray grounds: Forsythia (1971) on the left, Falling Blossoms (1971) on the right, and in the center, the pure gray-and-white Apple Blossom Burst (1971), for my money the most perfect picture in the show.  Still, because of those tough gray fields, and because one must first view the pictures from a greater distance, even these three wonderful images may inevitably perhaps appear a little smaller and more distant than the work in the first gallery—more remote in a physical sense and therefore perhaps a figurative one as well.

What most truly characterizes Bush’s mature work is a seriousness, even a gravitas that amounts to a truly Olympian detachment, and, in a culture that often tends to resent high seriousness, this may appear a drawback. It is to be hoped that viewers of this inviting exhibition will be able to scale the heights of Bush’s Olympus without suffering overmuch from the absence of too many companions.

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