Jack Bush: Coping and Coming of Age in the 1960s

Abstract

This essay re-evaluates the disavowed relationship between the advertising career and colour field paintings of the Canadian artist Jack Bush (1909-77). Bush’s belated transition out of the world of graphic design uniquely equipped him to fulfill the efforts of the American formalist critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) to buttress the remnants of the historical avant-garde through a strategic rationalization of pop cultural forms and commercial techniques. The resulting co-optation reflected transformations in the Canadian advertising industry during the 1960s, which mirrored developments in the United States in accommodating the symbols of popular protest movements to re-entrench establishment interests. The resemblance between certain late paintings by Bush and the conventions of psycho-medical modelling and other graphic instruments deployed by Madison Avenue researchers troubles uncritical readings of the formalist agenda usually said to have informed these artworks.