Jack Bush

Jack Bush (1909–1977) is best known as one of Canada’s foremost abstract painters and a major figure in the development of Colour Field painting and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Born John Hamilton Bush in Toronto, he began his career as a commercial artist before emerging in the 1950s as a founding member of Painters Eleven, the influential Toronto group that helped establish abstraction as a significant force in Canadian art. His mature paintings—distinguished by brilliant colour, economical compositions, and freely painted bands, bars, and floating forms—brought him international recognition and placed him in dialogue with leading American abstractionists of his generation. Bush was included in Clement Greenberg’s landmark exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction in 1964 and represented Canada at the São Paulo Bienal in 1967. His importance lies not only in his achievements as a colourist, but also in the unusually successful way he carried Canadian abstraction into the international modern-art world of the 1960s and 1970s.

Bush spent portions of his childhood in London, Ontario, and Montreal before returning to Toronto in 1928. He trained at the Art Association of Montreal and later attended evening classes at the Ontario College of Art, studying with artists including Frederick Challener, John Alfsen, and Charles Comfort. For much of his career he supported himself in advertising and commercial art, while his early paintings reflected the influence of Comfort and the Group of Seven and concentrated largely on landscape and figurative subjects. He first exhibited with the Ontario Society of Artists in 1936. By the early 1950s, however, exposure to contemporary abstraction in Toronto and New York led Bush decisively away from representation. In 1953 he joined ten other Toronto painters in forming Painters Eleven, whose exhibitions helped establish a receptive audience for abstract art in Ontario. A pivotal moment came in 1957 when the influential American critic Clement Greenberg visited Bush’s studio. Greenberg encouraged him to develop the qualities evident in his more spontaneous works, contributing to Bush’s evolution toward the distinctive Colour Field language for which he became internationally known. Bush subsequently formed connections with artists including Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski and, after years of working simultaneously in commercial art, devoted himself fully to painting in 1968.

In addition to Painters Eleven, Bush was affiliated with the Ontario Society of Artists, the Canadian Group of Painters, the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and the Art Directors Club of Toronto. His international breakthrough included his first New York solo exhibition at Robert Elkon Gallery in 1962 and his selection for Greenberg’s influential Post Painterly Abstraction exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, alongside artists associated with a new generation of American abstraction. He represented Canada, with Jacques Hurtubise, at the 1967 São Paulo Bienal, and his work was shown that year at the Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition Canada ’67. A solo exhibition was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1972, and the Art Gallery of Ontario organized a major retrospective in 1976 that subsequently toured Canada. His work was again the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in 2014–15. Bush’s paintings and prints are represented in important public collections in Canada and internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and Tate in London. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada shortly before his death in Toronto in January 1977.