PROVENANCE
Waddington Galleries, London, UK, May – September 30, 1971
Waddington Gallery, Montreal
Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton, 1975
Private Collection, Edmonton
Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 27, 2015, lot 43
Private Collection, Nova Scotia

LITERATURE
Karen Wilkin, editor, “Wendy Brunelle Talks with Jack Bush,” Jack Bush, 1984, page 195
Marc Mayer and Sarah Stanners, Jack Bush, National Gallery of Canada, 2014, essay by Marc Mayer, page 21, 10 photos of the artist painting Red Loop Low reproduced pages 10 and 13
Sarah Stanners, Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3, 1966 – 1971, 2024, listed page 452 and reproduced page 453, catalogue #2.134.1971.1

EXHIBITED
Theo Waddington Gallery, Montreal, Jack Bush, April 16 – May 15, 1975
Edmonton Art Gallery, long-term loan

At the time that Jack Bush painted Red Loop Low in January 1971, the artist had works on show in exhibitions at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, the Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Just 13 months later, a large survey of his paintings was celebrated in a solo exhibition entitled Jack Bush: The Inauguration of the New Contemporary Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bush had secured an international following for his work, and his paintings from the 1970s show a greater level of confidence than ever before.

The pivot between the suggestion of illusion and the assertion of flat abstraction is a playing field for Bush in his mottled-ground works. In Red Loop Low we are explicitly directed to acknowledge the “loop” at the bottom of the painting, yet the depiction of the loop is illusive—we cannot actually see a rounding loop. The solidity of the red gesture only permits us to imagine that the artist has made a looping action in his brush-stroke.

The opacity of the red loop serves another function: to interrupt the illusion of depth suggested by the mottled ground. Like Henri Matisse’s cut-outs of solid hues, Bush’s four flat figures of colour in Red Loop Low become shapes of colour pinned to the wall, or in this case, canvas. The variegated ground mimics texture but never embodies the look. Bush’s paintings have been called mischievous (most recently by Marc Mayer in his essay “Jack Bush: A Double Life”). They tease the eye, as well as our basic sensibilities when approaching a painting. Why am I drawn to the clashing colours? Why does the shape floating into the picture frame bother me? Why is this Colour Field artist playing with a figure-ground relationship? These questions keep the paintings fresh because they are not easily answered; they endure in our mind.

It seems as though Bush avoided instant gratification (for the viewer) in his work from the 1970s. It is a step away from his “POW” effect, which was prevalent in the 1960s with paintings such as Green + Purple (1963 – 1964), in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, or Split Circle #2 (1961), at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. These paintings were intended to knock the viewer over with a strong visual punch of solid colours in tight formats. Critics of the time praised paintings that the eye (and mind) could capture in one glance. That is not to say that simplicity was desired, but rather that high modernist art could do away with narrative. The drama of a high modern painting in a work such as Split Circle #2 could be felt in one shot, rather than progressively, as is the case in a painting where a story unfolds (think, for instance, of a painting by William Kurelek).

In an interview from January 1977 (the month that the artist passed away), Bush told Wendy Brunelle about his process of putting down colours in a painting: “ ‘Well now, Mr. Yellow, what would you like next door?’ (I am just thinking to myself) If the answer isn’t sure, I will put a piece of colour over here. Let it take care of itself. It starts to almost tell me sort of what to put next.” In the 1970s, Bush began to push the post–painterly abstraction envelope—letting in a sense of painterliness with his grounds and letting colours pose as characters in his great plays with paint.

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 adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Art History, for contributing the above essay.

This work is included in Stanners’s recently published Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, as #2.134.1971.1.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars