PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Alan Wilkinson, Toronto
Waddington & Shiell Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Miriam Shiell Fine Art, Toronto
Private Collection, Vancouver

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Jack Bush: Small Works from the Late Years, Gallery One, 1988, the chalk and pencil study entitled At Sundown reproduced, unpaginated

EXPOSITION
André Emmerich Gallery, New York, Jack Bush: New Paintings, 1976

At Sundown represents the awe-inspiring colours that dusk welcomes in the summer sky. Painted in July 1976, it was Jack Bush’s last summer before he passed away suddenly in January 1977. Even in his late years, he was brimming with new ideas and techniques. In this painting, metallic paint is used sparingly, but to great effect. To date, there are only five extant Bush paintings on record that employ metallic paints; out of more than 1,855 works in the artist’s painted oeuvre, these paintings are not only beautiful, but rare.



On July 5, 1976, the artist received a shipment of new paints, and the next day he painted At Sundown. These new paints were metallic and although he used them economically—in this case, reserving the new medium for the lyrical strokes of green, pink, teal, purple and blue—they represent the last innovation in his materials as a painter. The previous time he had sought out a new paint medium was in 1966, when he gave up oil and Magna paints to use water-based acrylics. That major shift was motivated by his wife’s sensitivity to the noxious fumes of the solvents needed to work with oil and Magna. While the metallic paints he purchased in 1976 created a new look, the glittery quality was just an additive to the water-based acrylic medium that he continued to prefer.



It was also in 1976 that the artist’s first retrospective exhibition was organized by, and launched at, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). During the retrospective’s final month, in October, the André Emmerich Gallery in New York City hosted its own solo exhibition, titled Jack Bush: New Paintings. At Sundown was included in this exhibition and was sold before the end of December. Although he was not directly involved with the retrospective, the buyer was AGO curator Alan G. Wilkinson. Wilkinson had helped to secure the major Henry Moore gift to the gallery in 1974, which precipitated the establishment of the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre, and over his 20-year career at the AGO (1974 – 1994), he also made key acquisitions, including works by Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Paul Gauguin, Constantin Brâncusi and Barbara Hepworth. Bush must have made a positive, and personal, impact on this Toronto-born curator.



At Sundown’s appeal to the discerning eye of its first owner is easy to imagine. It is, quite literally, a shining example of the artist’s late work. It combines his signature mottled ground with a generous flurry of colourful strokes, which spur a constant sense of fascination not unlike the experience of watching sweeping clouds in an evening sky.



We thank Sarah Stanners, PhD, 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 will be included in Stanners’s forthcoming Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné.



Included with this work is the catalogue for the Gallery One exhibition Jack Bush: Small Works from the Late Years, October 8 – 27, 1988, in which the chalk and pencil study At Sundown is reproduced. In the catalogue essay, Karen Wilkin writes: “In the 1970s Bush began to make his small studies in colored chalk rather than in felt pen. Perhaps he felt the grainy chalk surface better approximated the rollered and sponged ground of his ’70s paintings, just as the smooth markers had mimicked his earlier canvases. The chalk studies were drawn in groups, then cut apart into single images and fastened to the studio wall to serve as suggestions for paintings. After a canvas had been successfully developed from the original note, Bush would correct the working sketch to make it correspond exactly to the finished painting…Bush then added the date of completion, the measurements and the eventual title of the finished canvas, so that the preparatory study was also a record.



PCRE-01261-0005-05

JACK HAMILTON BUSH

At Sundown

chalk and pencil on paper

[measurements possible?]



This work is from Jack Bush: Small Works from the Late Years, Gallery One, 1988, reproduced, unpaginated



Not for sale with this lot

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