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Jack Bush's enormous success as a colour-field painter in the '60s
and '70s has greatly overshadowed his early career, when he was
gaining recognition during the '40s as one of Toronto's leading
painters. To remedy this bias within the National Gallery's collection,
a recent purchase was made of seven watercolours dating from 1930
to 1958 from the Bush Estate. Haunted House is among Bush's
strongest early watercolours. It is an excellent example of his
ability to work with the mainstream of Toronto's conservative and
isolated artistic community. Haunted House's asymmetry
and its rather naive references to Cubism are typical of the superficial
knowledge and understanding of the major trends in abstraction found
among Toronto artists of the time. Nevertheless, it does show that
Bush was searching for a more advanced artistic language. The vivid
accent colours and the sense of motion created by the lopsided chairs
and windows presage the essential elements in Bush's colour paintings
to come.
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