ARCA CGP CSGA CSPWC OSA P11
1909 - 1977
Canadian
Struggle
oil on board
signed and on verso signed, titled, dated 1949 and inscribed "Toronto" / "P-39" and variously
23 1/2 x 27 5/8 in, 59.7 x 70.2 cm
Estimate: $15,000 - $20,000 CAD
Sold for: $15,000
Preview at:
PROVENANCE
Collection of the Artist
Estate of the Artist
Private Collection, Toronto
LITERATURE
Jack Burtch, Jack Bush – Hymn to the Sun, Early Work, Art Gallery of Algoma, 1997, reproduced page 84
EXHIBITED
Art Gallery of Algoma, Sault St. Marie, Ontario, Jack Bush – Hymn to the Sun, Early Work, May 1 – June 22, 1977, traveling in 1997 - 1999 to Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax; the Art Gallery of Newfoundland, St. John’s; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Hart House, University of Toronto; Laurentian University, Museum and Art Gallery, Sudbury; MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Art, Calgary
Jack Bush’s artistic transition from representation to abstraction was both gradual and complex. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Bush was a landscape and figure artist with a fine sense of line, a part of the generation of Ontario painters who came after the Group of Seven. As his approach became more dramatic and stylized, throughout the late 1940s and very early 1950s he produced a series of works, sometimes religious in tone, often presenting anonymous figures struggling against difficulty, doubt, and anxiety, sometimes even other people, as in the case of Struggle. Work from this transitional period is often deeply psychological and symbolic in tone, and is key to a fuller understanding the joyfulness and freedom of Bush’s colour field paintings that followed.
This work was included in the Art Gallery of Algoma’s exhibition Jack Bush – Hymn to the Sun, a celebration of Bush’s pre-abstract work that toured Canada in the late 1990s.
This work will be included in Sarah Stanners’s forthcoming Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné.
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