Among the fifteen works in Jack Bush’s London series, London #12 is notable as the second-largest work remaining in private hands. Bush was thinking big in the 1970s. Painted between April and September 1973, this series took shape shortly after his first major museum survey, a breakthrough moment for a Canadian artist, since it was held in the United States instead of Canada. In 1972, that survey was presented as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it inaugurated the museum’s new contemporary art wing—a milestone both for the institution and for his career. One headline in the papers declared, “Bush’s Glowing Art Opens New MFA Gallery.”[1]

While many of the London series paintings were sent abroad to Leslie Waddington’s gallery on Cork Street in London, England, the artist held onto London #12. Its size may have been a factor, or he may have felt compelled to continue working on the painting. It is one of the later paintings in the London series, and the stroke of mustard orange in the lower left quadrant is indicative of the artist’s habit of editing or “going back into” his paintings at this time, especially between 1972 and 1973. Bush was not hasty in this process, but rather thoughtful. If a painting appeared to be too perfect or pretty, he felt compelled to disrupt the banality of perfection. Here, he lets the lone stroke dangle in the left-hand corner. It is bothersome. It is unlike the upright, brightly coloured strokes on the right. It is an anomaly, and that is the point. Complexity in the composition holds our attention and sustains our enjoyment for not just a moment, but for years.

London #12 first left Canada for exhibition in 1981, four years after the artist had passed away. The André Emmerich Gallery in New York City mounted a commemorative exhibition, surveying works made between 1973 and 1976. Emmerich was the pre-eminent dealer of Colour Field art in the US, and it was he who introduced Bush to Leslie Waddington in 1965, precipitating ongoing solo exhibitions in London during the artist’s lifetime. Emmerich continued to represent Bush until 1986, amounting to more than 20 years of selling the artist’s paintings in both New York City and Zurich, Switzerland.

While more recently shown in Canada, the painting spent most of its life in a prestigious US-based private collection. I first saw the painting in 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The most robust art collectors and art philanthropists of the 1980s and 1990s encountered London #12. Bush was in good company and big paintings were not only a joy to live with but a way to impress. Of course, this continues today, but if London #12 had elbows to rub, they would be well worn by prestigious passers-by, such as the Gund family, the Cabots, the Solomons, and countless museum directors and curators, such as Kenworth Moffett and William Rubin, who all circulated by this painting at private parties and public exhibitions. The life of a painting is long, and in the case of London #12, it has been colourful in more ways than one.

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. Stanners is currently the executive director and chief curator at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario.

This work is included in Stanners’s recently published Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, as #2.174.1973.53.

1. Susan Drysdale, Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 1972, 5.