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LOT 016

ARCA CGP CSGA CSPWC OSA P11
1909 - 1977
Canadian

London #6
acrylic polymer on canvas
on verso signed, titled, dated July 1973 and inscribed "Top" (with arrow) / "Toronto"/ "acrylic polymer W.B." / and on the tacking margin of the canvas "Top Horizontal" with a graphite sketch of this painting
76 x 109 1/2 in, 193.1 x 278 cm

Estimate: $300,000 - $400,000 CAD

Sold for: $289,250

Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave

PROVENANCE
Waddington Gallery, London, UK, 1973
Theo Waddington Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Toronto

EXHIBITED
Waddington Galleries, London, UK, Jack Bush, May 21 - June 15, 1974


From the spring through autumn of 1973, Jack Bush executed 15 paintings in what is known as his London series. Bush painted this series in acrylic on canvas and the “London” title indicated their intended first destination: Waddington Galleries on Cork Street in London, UK. From May 21 to June 15, 1974, the gallery hosted a solo exhibition simply titled Jack Bush. With input from Alkis Klonaridis, who was the manager for David Mirvish Galleries in Toronto, Bush selected 11 paintings from the London series to send abroad for the exhibition at Waddington’s. Our painting, London #6, was included in that shipment, and it was the second-largest painting in the show, second only to London #5, which is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Guelph. After the London exhibition, London #6 was delivered to the Theo Waddington Gallery in Montreal. Leslie Waddington, who was based in London, was known to send paintings to his brother Theo, who opened his own gallery in Canada.

In 1972, just one year before he painted London #6, Bush enjoyed his first solo exhibition in a major museum in the United States. The inaugural exhibition of the new wing dedicated to contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was a survey of Bush’s best abstract work to that date. In addition to the exhibition at Waddington Galleries in London, the artist was exhibited outside of Canada at six more venues in 1974 alone, namely the Storm King Art Center in New York State; the André Emmerich Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; the Robert Elkon Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery in New York City; and the Cologne Art Fair in Germany.

The artist’s London and Totem paintings emerged around the same time. His Totem series features brush-stroke-like sections of several distinct colours stacked vertically in a totemic manner, all set against a mottled background. The strokes of colour in the London paintings do not connect like the Totems; instead, these playful colours dance across the canvas in a lyrical manner, flowing like free jazz notes, unorganized but pleasing. As jazz music challenges the ear, London #6 challenges the eye with a sequence of colours that are at once unrelated and compatible. While his colours are never predictable, London #6 possesses two of Bush’s winning colour techniques, as seen in the two yellows and two blues. Imagine an echo returning a call, but in another voice; here we have blue repeated – bright and electric blue at left and a Wedgewood-like blue at the right. Yellow repeats, too – electric banana at left and muted mustard seed yellow at right. These disparate tones of the same colour bother the eye in a way that holds our attention far longer than any perfectly pretty painting.

Writing in 1984, in posthumous praise of Bush’s prowess with colour, the New York art critic Clement Greenberg described the artist’s growth by association with his Colour Field peers:

With [Kenneth] Noland, like him and not like him, [Bush] became a supreme colourist. When it comes to putting one colour next to another, Noland and Bush are alone in this time and maybe in any other. The juxtaposition of colours is different from the suffusion, the blending and flooding of them. I’m talking here about the distinct, discrete hues in their adjacency. Not that one way is inherently better than the other, not at all. Only that the latter was rarer, at least in Western art.[1]

London #6 is a great example of Bush’s mastery of “distinct, discrete hues in their adjacency,” which together make a painting that is beautiful because of its daring.

We thank Dr. Sarah Stanners, director of the Jack Bush Catalogue Raisonné, contributor to the Bush retrospective originating at the National Gallery of Canada in 2014, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Art History, for contributing the above essay.

This work will be included in Stanners’s forthcoming Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné.

1. Clement Greenberg, “Jack Bush,” in Jack Bush, ed. Karen Wilkin (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart in association with Merritt Editions, 1984 ), 7.


Estimate: $300,000 - $400,000 CAD

All prices are in Canadian Dollars


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