Sold for: $481,250

PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto
Charles Millard, Washington, DC, 1971 - 1978
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Ethan Stroud, Texas
Contemporary Art, Christie's New York, November 12, 1980, lot 54
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Marcel Elefant, Montreal, 1981 - 1991
Private Collection, Montreal, 1991 – circa 2006
Miriam Shiell Fine Art, Toronto
Marilyn and Charles Baillie
Private Collection, California

LITERATURE
Karen Wilkin, editor, Jack Bush, 1984, reproduced page 137

However abstract Jack Bush ever got, the real world always touched his work in one way or another. In the case of Blue, Red #4, the true inspiration for the painting was out of this world. The artist’s second record book, in which he logged his paintings from about 1961 through 1973, reveals that this painting was initially titled Moon Approach. Although Bush crossed out this more descriptive title, the painting’s shapes and colours remain connected to its core influence: the Apollo 10 mission to orbit the moon.

Bush painted this abstract canvas between May 28 and May 30, 1969, just days after NASA’s Apollo 10 mission returned to Earth on May 26. Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal for Apollo 11, which landed humans on the moon later that summer, on July 20, 1969. Until then, Apollo 10 was the closest a manned spacecraft had ever gotten to the moon. On the mission’s fourth day, astronauts flew the lunar module within 14.5 kilometres of the moon’s surface. The lunar module was nicknamed Snoopy on account of Apollo 10’s mandate to pass close to the moon’s surface so they could capture images to help prepare for the future mission’s landing.

Most notably, Apollo 10 made the first live colour TV broadcast from space. According to NASA, Apollo 10’s several TV broadcasts caught the attention of more than a billion people who watched from home. Viewers saw their own planet appear smaller and smaller and, eventually, it was seen to rise above the lunar horizon. The Bushes owned a colour TV, and this live footage of the spacecraft’s moon approach undoubtedly made an impression on the artist. The line in Bush’s painting resembles a pivoted horizon line, just like so many of the images transmitted from the Apollo 10 mission, which made vertical passes over the lunar surface (figure 1). In the painting, the two half-shapes on either side of the red line recall the shape of the Earth, half in shadow, as it rose over the moon’s surface. With two of these shapes on either side of the line, it is possible that one represents the Earth (seen from the moon) and the other represents the moon (seen from the Earth).

The colours in this painting are so distinct that they earned their place in Bush’s revised title, Blue, Red #4. The background is overtly sky blue and, however abstract this composition may be, it exudes a sense of positivity like the great blue yonder. More literally, it is the kind of blue that backdrops virtually all rocket launches seen on TV. Even more specifically, the red line might have been inspired by the curious red line created by the window of the spacecraft seen in several photos and TV broadcasts from Apollo 10 (figure 2).

On a purely aesthetic level, Bush had been experimenting with the contrast between red and blue in his paintings from the beginning of 1969. In January he painted Red, Blue #1 and in February he painted Red, Blue #2. The last two paintings in this quasi series, Blue, Red #3 and Blue, Red #4, were both painted in May and bear titles with a slight variation from the first two. Unlike the first three paintings, Blue, Red #4 does not boast a multicoloured fringe of stripes along its bottom half. Paradoxically, this painting is the most starkly abstract composition, and yet it is the most referential. Blue, Red #4 marks a shift in our world view. The revolution (around the moon) was being televised, and it was in full colour.

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.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars