Jack Bush

This major monograph on the extraordinary career of the Canadian painter is published to accompany the first retrospective exhibition in over 35 years. Born in Montreal and raised in Toronto, Jack Bush (1909-1977) reinvented himself like very few artists moving from a close association with Canada's Group of Seven landscape painters to an even closer association with the great names of international modernist abstraction. Four experts in their fields outline Bush's ambitious trajectory from his years as an illustrator, through his membership in seminal art associations like the Canadian Group of Painters and Painters Eleven, to his career-changing meeting with the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg. The artist's enduring professional relationship with the art world's most prominent intellectual of the time would ignite his international career and place him alongside Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella as one of the great Color Field artists. Jack Bush's singular transformation from provincial artist in the 1940s to celebrated figure on the New York and London gallery scenes in the 1960s and 70s is engagingly told through new photography, previously unpublished diary excerpts and fresh scholarship making this unprecedented survey of his life and work the definitive book on the artist to date. With more than 120 full-color plates, this superb publication features works that boldly burst through as the best in high modern art.