PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto
Acquired from the above by Jared Stable, 1967
Waddington Galleries, Montreal
Acquired from the above by a Prominent Private Collection, Montreal, 1977

LITERATURE
Barrie Hale, “The Bush Exhibition: Sure, Free, Beautiful,” Toronto Telegram, November 19, 1966, page 23
Paul Russell and Barry Lord, Ten Decades, Ten Painters, 1867 – 1967, 1967, listed, unpaginated
Sarah Stanners, Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3, 1966 – 1971, 2024, listed page 74 and reproduced page 75, catalogue #2.58.1966.00

EXHIBITED
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Jack Bush, 1966
New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, Ten Decades, Ten Painters, 1867 – 1967, fall 1967, traveling in 1967 to Rothman's Art Gallery, Stratford, catalogue #49

Two Yellows is the kind of painting that demands to be seen. Moreover, if you have seen it, you might demand that others take a moment and just revel in its bright show of yellows, blues and greens. When this painting debuted at the David Mirvish Gallery’s first solo Jack Bush exhibition, the Toronto Telegram art critic Barrie Hale explained his response after seeing the show for the first time: “I felt that I wanted to drag people from all over the world in by the sleeve to say to them, ‘Look, look what this man has done.’ ”

Hale’s review perceived the exhibition as a survey of abstraction: “It is as if Bush has taken up every gauntlet thrown down in recent years in the lists of abstract painting—hard edge to painterly, flat to textural, movement to iconography—and the whole Josef Albers color scale as well.… He has met every challenge, it seems to me, astonishingly well, and on his own terms.” Two Yellows avoids texture altogether but makes a bold statement in the pure power of colour and line, and while the format is entirely different, the close side-by-side placement of colour delightfully recalls Albers. Yet where Albers is exact, Bush is easygoing.

Bush’s hard-edged abstraction does not attempt to hide his hand; colour nestled next to colour bleeds freely at some points or licks out into the unpainted portions. One can imagine the artist’s hand at work, and yet this somehow adds to the magical feel of the painting. Bush is not interested in illusion—the utter flatness is a testament to that—but rather the feeling of colour. Where he might be playing with optical effect is hinted at in the title: there are two yellows bookending the composition, one just ever so slightly different than the other. This is not, however, about tricking the eye, but about celebrating the character of the colour—“Mr. Yellow,” as he sometimes called it—and its capacity for nuanced expression.

The format of Two Yellows, which Bush executed in August 1966, is in keeping with many of his best canvases sent to Brazil for the Bienal de São Paulo the following year. A central body of stacked colour unites two flanking fields of colour, like works in his Sash series, but this time the painting asserts its uniqueness: this colour column has an additional flanking set of panels. One other Bush painting from this time does the same (Colour with Border, from August 1968, bears two side panels at one side—white and yellow). The mature painter was taking strategic risks, painting unexpected formats and taking fresh approaches. Less than six months before Two Yellows was painted using an acrylic medium, Bush had given up oil paints, a medium he had been using since at least 1926.

By 1966, Bush had secured a place on the rosters of art dealers abroad, including Leslie Waddington in London, UK, and André Emmerich in New York. Bush had not had a big solo exhibition in Toronto since his days with Gallery Moos, in 1964. His 1966 show at the David Mirvish Gallery was a coming-out for his international profile, now announced on home turf. Bush knew the deal: the only way to make it big was to make an impression outside of Canada before attempting to have any success at home. But the time had come; Bush dressed dapperly and smiled big for the opening press attention. He was assured of what he had accomplished and felt ready to wow Toronto.

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 #2.58.1966.00.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars