Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

Jack Hamilton Bush 1909 - 1977 Canadian acrylic polymer on canvas Twirl 80 x 65 1/2 inches 203.2 x 166.3 centimeters on verso signed, titled, dated April 1971 and inscribed ""Toronto"" Literature:T. A. Heinrich, "Jack Bush: A Retrospective", Artscanada, March/April 1977, page 6 Karen Wilkin, Jack Bush, 1984, page 162 Provenance:Private Collection, Toronto Aside from his well-known association with Painters Eleven, Jack Bush remains celebrated as an artist who became an inspiration for the careers of the generation of Canadian abstract and semi-abstract painters to follow him. Those younger artists include many who were to become the stalwarts of the Toronto School of painters such as Gordon Rayner, Richard Gorman and Paul Fournier as well as those producing colour-field paintings on the Prairies. By the time he was 59 years old, Bush had shown his works in well-received solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in major art centres including New York, San Francisco, London and Paris as well as in Toronto and Montreal. His paintings were to be seen hanging side-by-side with those of prominent practitioners of the Abstract Expressionist movement, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Nonetheless, his first solo show in a major institution took place at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1972; and his first touring Canadian retrospective was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario only in 1976. Bush died a few weeks after attending the opening of that exhibition when it traveled to the Edmonton Art Gallery in January of 1977. It was on the strength of a 1968 Guggenheim Fellowship and a two-year appointment as visiting artist at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, that Bush thought the time had come for him to retire from his employment as a commercial designer and devote himself to painting full time. In the early 1970s, Bush began to apply his acrylic paints to wet on wet canvas, using broad brush-strokes, sponges and paint rollers, creating a textured surface that provided a sharp contrast between the ground and the overlying strong calligraphic forms he superimposed in lively, opaque colours. In describing what he refers to as a significant change in Bush's technique, Theodore Heinrich writes: ".....these things .....acknowledge the immanence of space which produced an instant freshening, a tentative shaking away of neo-academic dust." In the spring of 1971, inspired and delighted by the garden of his Toronto home, Bush created a series of much-admired gouache on paper works that ultimately evolved into a series of large-scale paintings, including Twirl. Here the rich, dark mottled surface provides a solid ground to support the artist's energetic, sweeping shapes. This spirited work, whose title also reflects the artist's love of music, is one that exemplifies curator Karen Wilkin's analysis of his imagery: "".....in Bush's own work, as in Matisse's, it is formal inspiration that determines the success of the pictures."" Wilkin praises ""Bush's compelling shapes, ravishing colour, and audacious placements"" as powerful features of his painting.