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owes something to Gottlieb's Bursts, but the animation of the image and the
picture's somber but brilliant color are Bush's own. Equally individual is a
slightly earlier black and purple painting where a tattered patch of color drifts
free of a centralized geometric "spine."
Bush lived in Toronto most of his life, but exhibited regularly in the
United States. Among other things, he took first prize in a Carnegie Interna–
tional exhibition, and in the early seventies the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
inaugurated its new department of contemporary art with a spectacular Bush
exhibition. His mature paintings were, in tact, more avid ly collected in the
United States than in Canada (or many years, but aftcr his death, the ab–
sence of annual shows of new work made Bush rar less visible in New York
than in Toronto. It's good
to
see Bush once again taking his place among the
artists with whom he fdt most sympathy during his lifetime.
Stephen Greene's fall exhibition of paintings and drawings from the
1960s, at Marilyn Pearl Gallery, offered further evidence of the value of
consistency and endurance. Greene has always been very much his own
man, hard to classify. He is a superb draughtsman who can allude, in a single
image, to the precision of mechanical drawing and the mystery of anatomical
illustration, an eccentric colorist with a ravishing touch, a recorder of delirium
worlds that flicker - improbabl y but conv incingly - between geometry and
biomorphism.
These days, Greene's pictures have a new context. The skulls and
thigh bones, the crutches and ladders that have haunted his paintings since the
1950s not only prefigure images prevalent in the \vork of younger painters,
but often sharply criticize the arbitrary way the younger generation makes
use of them. Greene's references, for all their ambiguity, are unmistakably
his;
they stand for deep, private feelings, not for ofIhand appropriation.
Greene's range was evident in the sixties pictures exhibited, from
meticulously delineated diagrams of other-worldly, threatening machines to
brushy, painterly evocations of dense atmosphere, through which forms
struggle to the
surl~lce.
Just when you think you have deciphered one of
Greene's suggestive dramas, it slip s away from you. Events are often
pushed to the edge of the canvas so that the most telling incident, the image
that will make everything legible, seems to occur just beyond the confines of
what we can see. It was good
to
confront Greene 's earlier paintings and
drawings again, proofofboth the singlemindedness of his obsessions and the
breadth of his conceptions.
Younger and less hll11iliar artists were also well l'Cpresented during the
fall
season, a goodman)' of them women. lIma) simply be an indication that
more women are making art at the end of the 1980s, but whatever the ex–
planation, the phenomenon is worth noting. Sara Jane Roszak, at John Davis
